my employee panics when we spend money

by Alison Green on November 5, 2024

A reader writes:

I have an employee who tries to save every penny of the organization’s money, at the expense of significant amounts of time. I’ve explained sticker price vs time costs multiple times, and yet any amount of money over about $50 sends him into an anxiety spiral where nothing I say makes an impact. I need him to be capable of watching the company spend money on supplies, IT infrastructure, furniture, advertising, etc. without getting panicked and suggesting high-effort, high-salary-cost ways of saving minor amounts of money.

I have discussed with him both why specific expenses are necessary and that this pattern is untenable. He agrees, but the next time an expense pops up, he panics and genuinely thinks we don’t understand that there are cheaper options, even when I remind him our earlier discussions.

He has acknowledged that he struggles with anxiety. When he’s not actively anxious, he’s good at his job. But the spirals are killing it. Barring moving him to a role where he would have no knowledge of our expenses at all, I’m at my wits end. Is there a framing for this that might sink in? I’d rather encourage understanding than just shut him down, but at this point I’ve done everything I can think of.

I answer this question over at Inc. today, where I’m revisiting letters that have been buried in the archives here from years ago (and sometimes updating/expanding my answers to them). You can read it here.

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{ 72 comments }

{ 72 comments… read them below or add one }

      1. Workaholic*

        thank you for sharing the follow up! I couldn’t access the link above and this saved me tons of frustration lol

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  2. I Can't Even*

    This is something that he needs to work on with a therapist/psychiatrist. At work your role is to set the expectations and he gets to develop a therapeutic plan on how to manage his anxiety so that he is able to meet those expectations.

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  3. Dust Bunny*

    Yeah, I’m a naturally anxious person (although nothing like this guy) who works for a nonprofit (chronically tight on funds) and we spend money on things that are technically not necessary, such as boxed lunches for employee awards day. But I trust my employers to make responsible budgeting decisions and also to respect us enough not to nickel and dime us over supplies.

    I would like to think that pointing that out might help, but I think (Fergus?) is rather beyond that right now.

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    1. Arrietty*

      I run a non-profit and we are taking all the staff out for dinner at Christmas. The total cost will be approximately one week’s salary for me (and I neither work full time nor get paid a high amount). If we couldn’t cover that, we have bigger problems than a single meal.

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      1. Dust Bunny*

        This, exactly.

        I am very comfortable with the way my organization prioritizes spending. I’m not gonna freak if they buy us tacos once or twice a year.

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  4. StressedButOkay*

    Oh man. Unfortunately, if this is an integral part of the job, I don’t think you can block information of spending from him. And you can only do so much to mitigate the panic. If there is an opening that he would be better suited to, that would be a good move – if not, this is not the job for him.

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  5. Telephone Sanitizer Third Class*

    This sounds like the person from a week or two ago who wanted to cut benefits to save money in a failing company.

    Reply ↓
    1. Empress Ki*

      It reminds me the LW who tried to save pennies for her employer by refusing to eat pizza when the organisation offered it to staff who worked late, and who by walking instead of using a taxi while carrying heavy equipment.

      Reply ↓
    1. Be Gneiss*

      Yes, that is how Alison makes money, so that dozens of other posts here each week can be free for you to read. Isn’t it wonderful that you get so much amazing content for free!

      Reply ↓
    4. Margaret Cavendish*

      Alison provides a huge amount of content for free on the main AAM site – including the original version of this letter if you use the search function.

      Reply ↓
    5. Caramel & Cheddar*

      Yes, that’s how she gets paid for her work. That said, this one looks like an error to me (the page just isn’t even fully loading for me) and I was pretty sure a few months ago she said the Inc articles would be free going forward, though perhaps that’s changed.

      Reply ↓
    6. Cordelia*

      People chime in to say this every time! You get a certain number of Inc articles for free, then you have to pay. That’s how Alison gets paid. If you don’t want to pay, then just read the huge amount of content she provides on this website for free.

      Reply ↓
  8. Angie S.*

    My dad was like that. He thought that spending more, even it was within the limit, reflected badly on him because he wasted the money that could be otherwise spent elsewhere. He was actually very proud of the money he saved. I didn’t quite understand all these until I started working and thought how stupid that was.

    My dad was a naturally frugal person, and no one could change the way he was. He is much better now.

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    1. Rex Libris*

      Yep, it’s a counterproductive mindset. As a manager, I want my reports to spend the designated money on the appropriate things. Trying to penny pinch just shows me you don’t have a good grasp of priorities and what we’re trying to achieve.

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    2. Blue Pen*

      My mom is an iteration of this. If she finds a coupon for a BOGO deodorant, for example, despite not needing any at the moment, not liking the brand, if the store to get it is too far away, whatever, she will still go out of her way to get it. She gets so hyper-focused on getting a “good deal” that she completely loses perspective on whether she even wants or needs the item, the cost of gas getting to that store, if she has time to go, etc.

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      1. Be Gneiss*

        My mother-in-law does this. Last time we were there, my husband did the math, and she had something like a 35-year supply of garbage bags. But she got a great deal on them.

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        1. 1-800-BrownCow*

          Same with my father-in-law, who is now deceased. Shortly before he passed, my husband and I were in his toolshed and he had a cabinet full of approximately 35 cordless drills. He would see a “good deal” so he’d purchase one even though he already had several. When we tried to tell him that buying multiple cordless drills he didn’t need wasn’t actually saving money, his response was that he never needed to change drill bits and he always had one ready to go for whatever he needed. He’d come up with justifications like that for good deal multiple items he’d buy. Every year when he went hunting for a week after Thanksgiving, my MIL would purge tons of stuff and donate it. Like multiple XL trash bags of unopened multipacks of socks. And boxes and boxes of mailing envelopes. It was so much stuff they’d never use in their lifetime.

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  9. Chairman of the Bored*

    IMO getting to burn through somebody else’s money buying cool stuff is one of the fun perks of working at a large organization.

    I just spent deep 5 figures outfitting a test cell, which is a totally legit expense and will pay for itself many times over throughout the life of the equipment. I also didn’t scrimp on the equipment, because it breaking or not being able to do the job would impose costs well beyond the cost of the hardware.

    It was nice to approach the related purchase selections with the mindset “what is the best available tool for this job?” rather than “how cheap of a thing can we get away with buying?”.

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    1. Angstrom*

      Yup. Applying personal finance standards to corporate spending doesn’t work — depreciation for tax purposes and value of time are just two of the things that are very different.

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      1. Antilles*

        Also, personal finance standards are on a completely different order of magnitude than corporate spending. Between salary, payroll taxes, insurance costs, etc, even a very small department of 10 people plus a manager has an annual budget firmly into seven figures solely for labor. Spending a few thousand extra bucks on things like IT infrastructure are way less impactful to a company than they would be to an individual.

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    2. Katie*

      I was given access to a tool that costs thousands of dollars a year in license fees. In the time that I have had access to it (July), it has paid for itself many times over that going the cheap solution hasn’t done.

      Reply ↓
  10. Non-profit Drone*

    It sounds like the employee is the Money Police person from a few weeks ago, who told everyone they should be drinking tap water and buying used clothes.

    Reply ↓
  11. Margaret Cavendish*

    It seems like a lot of the letters this week have been about managing other people’s emotions! Possibly just confirmation bias on my part – or projecting, since I’m spending a fair amount of time doing that lately as well.

    Reply ↓
  12. Wooooosh*

    I had a boss like this. He always refused to spend funds allocated for our team. Eventually, we got a new boss, and we were all so excited to spend that massive pile of money on all the supplies and materials we so badly needed… just for new boss to learn that the money lapsed each year it was not spent.

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    1. Captain dddd-cccc-ddWdd*

      New boss (if they had budget authority) ought to have known that budgets are generally annual and left over money isn’t carried forward like that… I am surprised actually that after a few iterations of this the budget hadn’t been cut since it was not being used!

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      1. Paint N Drip*

        Right, the department is lucky there was still a budget line for them to use after a few years of that nonsense

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    2. Roy G. Biv*

      ANNUAL budget. No incentive for not spending it. And no way to get that extra amount you saved in next year’s budget. It is sad when people in management positions do not seem to grasp this very basic concept in budgeting. That boss was only hurting his own department, in the short term, and as it happened, in the long term.

      Reply ↓
      1. bamcheeks*

        In my first job, I wasn’t in finance but I controlled a small budget, and so did lots of academics I worked with. In my first week, the departmental accountant sat down with me and told me in six different ways that the money didn’t roll over and had to be spent each year. Ok, cool. Over the next year, I watched half the academics have this concept explained to them half a dozen times and freak out each time (the Reply-All email saying, “the university has STOLEN FROM US!!!!” was a highlight), and I understood why she’d taken such great care to explain it!

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        1. bamcheeks*

          (Oh, I forgot that this was 2008 so obviously the Reply-All email included a reference to how this was exactly like the illegal banking practices of Enron.)

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    3. Seal*

      By not spending down your allocated budget every year you also run the risk of getting a permanent budget cut (aka use it or lose it). It’s much easier to spend the money you get than make the case for a budget increase.

      The same is true for how you spend the allocated budget. My previous job hired an inexperienced new director whose managerial style drove off half the staff in less than a year. Rather than try to fill vacancies as they occurred, they kept insisting they were still “thinking” about the staffing situation. The rather substantial amount of money from lapsed salaries was instead spent on questionable building, furniture, and equipment updates that were ordinarily funded by the organization or fundraising. Imagine the new director’s surprise when they found out that their budget was getting cut since they “obviously” didn’t need to fill the positions they sat on for months and years.

      Reply ↓
  13. VP of Monitoring Employees’ LinkedIn and Indeed Profiles*

    Does his “avoid-spending-at-all-costs” approach stem from a genuine (if misguided) fear that expenditures will be deducted from his own paycheck?

    Reply ↓
    1. pally*

      I’m betting he fears the company will go under – and he will subsequently be out of a job – unless management takes his money management approach to heart.

      Reply ↓
  14. Scrooge*

    If I was LW I would reduce expenses within reason. You have to spend money to make money but if cash hits 0 you have no buisness. I agree that OP is doing a job that would be good for him a little too excessively, the principals apply. Is spending less money costing you too much time. Although a speedy payment system saves money and is thus worth it. I’m wondering if he is simply not calculating all costs, only financial cost in which case ikea furniture is better than quality office furniture, although ikea furniture breaks faster making quality office furniture is better. I want to point out that I would higher OP to ensure finances are sound. As long as OP weighs decisions properly.

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      1. Antilles*

        Yeah, I don’t see anything here indicating OP is wasting money.
        When OP mentions “sticker price versus cost” and the employee suggesting “high effort, high salary-cost items”, to me, that reads that the employee is looking simply at the upfront sticker price of the item. Meanwhile, he’s missing all of the non-obvious costs in efficiency, wasted employee time, missed opportunities, etc. These items don’t show up in a line-item spreadsheet, but are very real costs.

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    2. Strive to Excel*

      If you check the original letter, you’ll see that the employee was indeed categorically unable to perceive of any non-monetary costs as being business costs. The idea of “this furniture will break more often so it will cost us more” simply did not come across. He was also pretty sure it was anxiety-related, rather than a rational concern, so there was only so much LW could do.

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    3. Person from the Resume*

      Why do you think the LW is approving unreasonable spending.

      The letter states he wants to do “high-effort, high-salary-cost ways of saving minor amounts of money.” And that the employee agrees with the LW when not in an anxiety spiral. “I have discussed with him both why specific expenses are necessary and that this pattern is untenable. He agrees …”

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    4. Caramel & Cheddar*

      There’s no indicating in the letter that reducing spending is even a goal, though. He needs to watch it, but that’s not the same thing. Watching it is knowing that you have $20k to spend on office supplies that year and adjusting accordingly when that number hits $12k five months into your fiscal year so that you don’t go over the allocated budget. He hasn’t been asked to get that spend down to $18k or $10k or whatever.

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      1. Captain dddd-cccc-ddWdd*

        I don’t get the impression he is even “watching” in that sense (or that he has any authority to have input to the decisions – sounds like he is just giving his opinion when it wasn’t asked for). I’ve taken “watching” to mean something even more passive, like ‘seeing’ the money be spent.

        As an anxiety patient myself I can fully relate to logically and intellectually acknowledging something, but then the anxious response taking over and driving that logic out – yes, even though you ‘know’, ‘logically’, what the facts are… I think what feeds this is partly lack of information. Does he have any context of what the overall budget is? What the revenue / profit / etc is relative to the money that’s being spent? and so on. Although actually, salaries/wages are one of the highest costs for many businesses, so it might be counter-productive if he saw how much was actually being spent on salaries and the stuff that goes with employing people (retirement contributions, insurance etc)!

        I seem to recall from the update to the original letter that the resolution was removing the 15% of duties that were purchasing-related from his workload and giving him something else instead – which will have worked for OP so in that sense it’s a good update, but also I don’t think this issue is really solved in a deep way and that is going to limit him as he goes up the ranks of business. I think you have to just detach yourself from it and don’t see the numbers as ‘the same’ as the ones you encounter in your personal life. Like my salary is £x and I deal with budgets and forecasts that involve spend of £2x monthly just on a small component of the company. There’s an art to treating the company’s money as carefully as you do your own, but also recognising that the numbers involved in business and the ways they operate are just different. Fundamentally the biggest difference (other than size) is household budgets are generally money in minus money out = amount left over for the month, where money out is what has to be spent on bills, debt repayments, commute, groceries etc. The “spend money to make money” factor is generally absent in household budgets.

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        1. Observer*

          Does he have any context of what the overall budget is? What the revenue / profit / etc is relative to the money that’s being spent? and so on.

          He should. The LW says that they have explained the concept of sticker price vs time costs, and that they “discussed with him both why specific expenses are necessary“, and have told him that “The company finances are being handled. Spending more time to save money is not efficient or lucrative, and company expenses are both planned and approved.” They expand a little on this in the comments to the original, but it’s clear that this behavior is not a rational reaction to lack of relevant information.

          I don’t think this issue is really solved in a deep way and that is going to limit him as he goes up the ranks of business

          You are completely correct, but that’s not on the LW to deal with. There is nothing that the LW can actually do to solve this in a deeper way. For that, this guy needs therapy and the LW cannot mandate that.

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    6. Observer*

      If I was LW I would reduce expenses within reason.

      And what is your evidence that there are costs that could *reasonably* be reduced?

      If you actually read what the LW says, you would see that yes, what the employee wants would cost too much. And that the employee is most definitely not considering the non-direct and non-immediate costs of the suggestions he is making. And that he’s also engaging in wishful thinking and trying to push the LW to act on his fantasies rather than reality.

      Even Scrooge understood the concept TCO, even if no one used that phrase.

      Reply ↓
    2. Paulina*

      On rereading the Guacamole Bob saga, I see him as more of a petty tyrant than genuinely anxious about expenses. His audit targets were that LW and a handful of other low-level employees in other units; he kept his micromanaging of minor expenses under-the-radar with respect to anyone who could affect his job, until that LW’s unexpected trip with the CEO. Those choices make it look like he was on a power trip, or at least that he was hiding his issues from anyone with pull. This LW’s employee, on the other hand, is pushing back against his own boss.

      Reply ↓
  16. Eldritch Office Worker*

    Did Inc get rid of their x amount of free articles thing? I’m not complaining about a paywall I’m just curious if something changed logistically. Sometimes I send articles to other people and that would be helpful to preface.

    Reply ↓
  17. Hobbit*

    I’m wondering if this is a person who has experienced being broke in their personal life. I went from being middle class to being just a few weeks from being homeless and robbing Peter to pay Paul to keep the utilities on and then back to middle class. Ever since then money is basically always on my mind and I often second and third guess purchases.

    Reply ↓
    1. Paint N Drip*

      Apparently they are used to working in non-profit and academic spaces, so at least they’re used to functioning with more time than money. But if they’ve worked in NP and academics… we can assume they may have been struggling with personal finances as well. Tough to tell where the anxiety is borne from, but either way it is really impacting their standing at work and it needs to be addressed.
      Personally, I’ve found that the less controlled my financial situation is, the more anxious I am about literally everything – buying a home has increased my baseline anxiety significantly. Sorry you’re still holding on to that fear too, I hope we can both can let some of that go and move into feeling abundance instead of lack.

      Reply ↓
  18. MuscleMemory*

    I suspect it’s a learned reaction. At most of the places I’ve worked employees were expected to find solutions that didn’t involve spending money. Basic things that cost money like desks and laptops were supplied, but don’t even think about buying a $20 piece of software that would shave 5 hours a week off the time it takes to do a repeated task.

    My boss told me to add an external person we work with to one of our software subscriptions and I triple checked he was okay with the $7/month fee.

    So while he should catch on over time if told it’s okay, I can understand it taking a few passes because the don’t spend money can be very engrained.

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  19. learnedthehardway*

    I remember my dad taking me grocery shopping when I first moved away from home, and explaining to me (while I carefully calculated the cost differential between the 10 oz and 28 oz tins of beans) that “Your time is worth something, too!”

    Words to live by.

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  20. Strive to Excel*

    I think online shopping has really exacerbated this mindset in some people. There, the most reliable stat is the price. Anything else is a toss-up. Reviews can be helpful but they’re a mixed bag, what stats are included with any given product is a big question mark, and pictures can be really unreliable. The result is a trained mentality that this type of paper here is the same type of paper over there, so why are we buying the one that’s twice as expensive.

    There’s an embroidery supplies store I go to when I need anything specialized despite the fact that they’re nearly an hour’s drive away, because I’ve been frustrated SO often by online purchasing.

    Reply ↓
  21. Polly Hedron*

    Meme said above:

    There’s no way to read this at the link without giving your email or paying.

    I understand that that’s how Alison gets paid.
    But on January 16, 2024, Alison had said

    I am happy to say that Inc. told me they’ve started putting my articles for them in front of their paywall so they will always be free and easy to read.

    and I would like to know if this is an error or whether Inc’s policy has changed.

    Reply ↓
  22. CommanderBanana*

    Introduce him to Guacamole Bob and let them enter a mutual spiral of cheapness and anxiety until they implode like a black hole.

    Reply ↓
  23. DawnShadow*

    Once as a new post doc I was washing dishes to help out in the lab, and my boss took me aside gently and said something I never forgot:

    If you wash dishes, I’m paying a dishwasher (your salary). We don’t have the money in this lab to be paying a dishwasher that kind of money. Leave the dishes for the undergrad assistant. I’m paying you to do graduate work.

    That advice had a lot of application outside the lab as well.

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    1. LJ*

      The extra sad part of this is that (from what I understand) post-docs don’t necessarily make more than janitors. The undergrad assistant is probably the one washing dishes for research credits

      Reply ↓
  24. Raida*

    Honestly, unless these spending anxiety attacks can be managed, I’d be moving him to a different role with no fiscal visibility.

    Perhaps forcing it into a process? Dedicating calendar time to frantically writing it all down, handing it/them off to you in a regular 1:1, and stating “I understand that these suggestions may not be financially viable and that you do understand the value in testing the market to ensure we get value for money. These represent no more than 20 minutes of work time.” Something like that? Just getting it out of his system, having a process to follow, having a specified limited amount of work time to dedicate to it?

    I’m thinking about how workmates have handled situation specific anxieties:
    Had one person spiral over when other people will contact each other – by sitting down and having it as a process, firmly ticking off his task, stating “These next three steps are the responsibility of A, B, C. I will review at [date].” Made it manageable. Addressed it. Wrote it down. Stated who’s job it is. Was able to let it go – and sleep at night during procurement!

    But if he can’t deal with it like this, and you want him to stay in the role, then it becomes his responsibility to GET HELP WITH HIS ANXIETY. Does your company have an EAP?

    Reply ↓

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