Value Categories
Spend lavishly on the three things you love, ruthlessly cut everything else.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 90%
Adapted from Ramit Sethi's money dials, Dunlap's Value Categories asks you to pick three areas of life that bring the most joy and pour most of your discretionary spending there while pulling back everywhere else. Her own three are travel, eating out, and plants. The point is to release guilt about what you love and stop letting society dictate that travel is acceptable but a designer bag is frivolous. Done well, it lets you save a large share of income while still living richly, because the cuts land only on things you don't care about.
Origin
Dunlap credits Ramit Sethi's 'rich life' and money-dials concept as a major influence and built the Value Categories version into Her First 100K's teaching and her book Financial Feminist.
Core principles
- 01Spending should be concentrated on what genuinely brings you joy.
- 02Cutting discretionary spend on things you don't value funds the things you do.
- 03Guilt about what you love spending on is society's judgment, not a rule.
- 04Value-based spending lets you save aggressively without feeling deprived.
How to run it
- 1
Name your three value categories
Choose the three areas of life that bring you the most joy and that you want your money going toward.
Pro tip Be honest; the categories are yours, not what looks respectable to others.
- 2
Fund them generously
Direct the majority of your discretionary spending into those three categories without guilt.
- 3
Cut everywhere else
Spend little on discretionary items outside your value categories since they matter less to you.
Pro tip Occasional small treats outside your categories are fine; just don't let them dominate.
- 4
Drop the guilt
Refuse to feel shame about spending on what you love, regardless of others' judgments.
In the wild
Dunlap's three value categories are travel, dining out, and houseplants; she'll happily buy cute pots and hangers for the roughly fifteen plants in her room. She still grabs an occasional Starbucks or TJ Maxx sweater, but she deliberately does not pour her money into those lower-priority things.
→ She spends abundantly on what she loves while keeping discretionary spending elsewhere low enough to save and invest heavily.
Common mistakes
Letting society pick your categories
Accepting that travel is virtuous but clothes or bags are frivolous means spending against your own joy to satisfy other people's judgments.
Spreading spend thin across everything
Without concentrating on three categories, discretionary money leaks into things that don't actually make you happy.
Is it for you?
Best for
People who want to enjoy their money and still save without a restrictive line-item budget.
Not ideal for
Those in acute financial crisis where core expenses already exceed income.
From the transcript
“we call it value value categories at her first center K so it's like three areas in your life that bring you the most joy…”
“don't feel guilt about what you love to start talking about because it's your happiness it's your life”
From the episode
Tori Dunlap: Unlocking Financial Freedom, the REAL Cause of Money Problems and How to Defeat Them for Good
Tori Dunlap