As we head into a new year, many people want to get ahead financially — but struggle to work out why their money never seems to stick.

In this TPC Gold clip, Ben unpacks the difference between intentional wealth and unconscious spending, highlighting how lifestyle creep, forgotten subscriptions and interest costs quietly erode surplus over time.

This short episode sets the foundation for building financial clarity and making better trade-off decisions with your money. If you want to take this further, Ben will be unpacking these ideas in detail in Empower Wealth’s upcoming live webinar, where you’ll learn how to track your money, target surplus, and take back control heading into 2026.

👉 Live webinar: 7:30pm AEDT, Tuesday 13 January 2026

👉 Register here

Timestamps

  • 00:00 – Intentional wealth vs unconscious spending
  • 00:57 – Lifestyle creep after pay rises
  • 02:31 – Set-and-forget subscriptions
  • 03:24 – Paying interest vs making progress
  • 05:29 – Giving every dollar a job
  • 06:42 – Turning surplus into long-term wealth

Transcript

Ben Kingsley
Hey everyone, as 2026 is upon us, I wanted to do this little bonus episode because it really does highlight the importance as you reflect on last year and we move into the new year, we want to be thinking about and planning for our life ahead. So I want to talk about intentional wealth versus unconscious spending.

Now, Bryce and I have always talked about this idea of unconscious spending, but I want to put a bit more flavour on it because the reality is that you have trade-offs and choices around what you do with your money. But if you don’t have consciousness around the decisions you make with your money, then you’re going to be in a situation where possibly you’re going to have this leakage, this spillage of money, and that’s going to have unintended consequences in terms of your future wealth. And when we talk about future wealth, what we’re talking about here is the ability to save and then ultimately invest into assets. So that’s what I want to talk about today.

And I want to start by talking about three particular examples where we might fall in to that unconscious spending. So let’s get started. So number one is lifestyle creep after pay rises. Now the big problem here, as we all know, is we get a little bit more money in our pocket and so all of a sudden we think we’ve got a little bit of extra discretionary money and so we put it to things like buying cars, maybe upgrading the holiday from a four-star hotel to a five-star hotel.

We’re all guilty of it. We want to keep up with the Joneses. You know, obviously we want our social reels to look great, but that is the reality here. That what we want to try and do is if we do get that extra money, that bonuses, we want to be able to trap them, put them away and put them to future use around that wealth creation story. So why this is so important is because in technical terms, the decision isn’t framed as a trade off. We just see extra money in our account. And so we think, okay, well,

I’ve got that extra money, sure, and I know I’ve got higher wages, so I’m just going to splurge and treat myself in that particular way. So we find ourselves when we’re out for dinner, maybe spending a little bit more, having drinks with friends. So it really is that classic case of unconscious overspending that we’re trying to limit. So the moment that you do frame it up as a trade-off, in other words, if every dollar’s got a job to do, then it becomes really powerful in the way in which we think about our money, because we think actually that’s gonna add to my surplus savings or it’s gonna add to my asset accumulation that’s gonna build wealth for me over time. The second example is obviously the classic set and forgets.

The world is convenient with digital money where we can set up certain direct debits for our subscriptions or our gym memberships and we just leave them go and they’re just rolling over but we may not be getting the value out of them. mean a good example for me I suppose is my KO membership.

I’m not a big cricket fan, but I’m a massive footy fan. So I love getting the AFL as a feed, but not necessarily. So maybe I should cancel that subscription over the summer period and then re-engage when I get the most value out of it. So to give you an idea of terms of what’s sort of at risk here in terms of the trade off, if we’re talking about $100 or $150 a week, we can potentially be talking upwards of $5,000 to $8,000 depending on how much we can save or that we’re getting the value out of those subscriptions. And my final example is around paying interest as opposed to what we would refer to it as owning progress.

And this comes in the form where the most of Australians struggle and that is they pay minimum repayments on things like their credit cards or any of their sort of personal car loans and those types of five-year loan terms. So you’ve got a regular repayment, but what we want to be doing is actually making extra repayments.

So if we make those extra payments earlier, guess what? We don’t incur the same amount of interest. And so the credit card is obviously the guilty pleasure there. So we wanna be making sure that we are paying extra. And if we’re obviously really, really good, we wanna effectively use those credit cards where we can have money sitting in our offset and have that sort of 55 day interest free period rolling over, but we’re then paying no interest.

So we get the value and even the things like the points and those other things, the rewards benefits that come with some guards, but we’re making sure we’re paying no interest at all. that is best practice. So we want to, again, summary, we want to make sure that we’re not paying minimum, because if we are, that means it extends the time that we hold that debt and the interest repayments that we’re making. So we ultimately pay a lot more interest over the long term. And this really does accumulate into tens of thousands of dollars of lifetime interes that we don’t want to be responsible for.

So if we can get in control of our money, trap that surplus and then start paying off those debts quicker, we’re going to save a lot longer. So a lot of our money isn’t being allocated to interest costs, it’s actually accumulating in our savings buffers and also the assets that we accumulate. All right, so we’ve looked at a couple of examples in terms of what takes us into this unconscious environment and this overspending.

Let’s now pivot and talk about what’s intentional wealth. Because this is the areas and the behaviors that we want to showcase to you. And I’ve got a couple of tips around this that will really bring it home in terms of the importance. Okay, so the very big one is working out where that money actually goes. And I realized that for a lot of people, that’s like, please pull my teeth out. This is something that I don’t want to do.

All that data entry, I don’t like being in spreadsheets. I don’t like doing all of that. But please understand that we can’t fix what we can’t see. So we need to understand where all that money’s going. And so we need to find a way to provide an understanding of where we’re allocating all of that money. So I think it’s really important that we sort of start thinking about where does that money go? The second point is what I mentioned earlier around every dollar potentially having a job to do.

And so that’s where you start to get conscious around your money and you start to understand these concepts of trade-offs because if I do decide to go out tonight and spend two or $300 entertaining myself and friends, then obviously if that money had another job to do, such as it’s part of the deposit that I wanna save for a home that I wanna have, those are the types of trade-off decisions. So the more you become conscious about those, the more value they’re gonna bring to you in terms of making the right decision to trap more surplus. Okay, and finally I wanna talk about where rubber hits the road.

And this is this idea that yes, what are we saving that money for? In some cases, we’re saving that money to build buffers, but in other cases, we want to really see where the rubber hits the road in accumulating assets. And we’re talking about potentially a family home or an investment property that’s appreciating over time. So the power of compounding happens when we hold those assets over long period of time.

And then we then think in the years and then the decades that follow, we’re then starting to accumulate a significant amount of wealth. And interestingly enough, those assets that we do buy are usually income producing. So maybe not the family home, but that grows in asset value. And if we’re getting into the property market for the first time, it’s getting on that property ladder. And then in five or six times, we might sell an upgrade and then move up to our dream home. So this is all about bringing it all together under this lifestyle by design principle that Bryce and I always talk about. And I think it’s important to understand that because

This is the bit in terms of delayed gratification, understanding the concept around trapping that surplus and then building that and accumulating that and then deciding what we’re going to do with that money in terms of saving for a deposit or starting our investment journey. So there you have it really short and sweet in terms of things that I want you to think about as we enter in the new year. And hopefully these might be some actions and new year’s resolutions that you want to implement because we do know that those behaviors exist.

We’ve shown you the examples in terms of what they look like, but now we want to basically get serious about that. And that’s why we’re introducing the 2026 Surplus Challenge. And what we want to do in this webinar, and I hope you can obviously join us on the 13th of January, where we’re going to unpack this in more detail. We’re going to take you through how you work out where your money’s going. We’re then going to show you basically how you allocate that money. So you feel in control, that sort of concept around

trade-off and decisions around that, and then ultimately what that impact will look like. So what happens if I keep doing that? Where does that asset value accumulate, those savings, or where am I gonna be able to invest that money? So please join us on this webinar where we really do take advantage of this 2026 surplus challenge, trying to save as much money as we can, because every dollar has a job to do, and we’re excited to show you how we can fast track that exercise, because we know it’s hard.

We understand that so we’ve got some really fantastic ways in which we can fast track for you to understand how you can sort and organise your money number one and then feel in control of it through a rules based system and then ultimately get to work in terms of targeting that surplus. So if you want to learn more the details are in the show descriptions below but of course you can take it straight to the website if you’re travelling and that is thepropertycouch.com.au forward slash webinar and I along with the team look forward to seeing you on the 13th. Until then, remember, knowledge is empowering, only if you act like it.