Sethi opens Chapter 4 with an anecdote about immigrant values. You can tell an immigrant, he says, by how much meat they eat off a chicken wing. Immigrants pick their wings clean. The anecdote relates a moral about waste: Americans unconsciously waste money because they don’t know how much they’re spending. In this chapter, Sethi shows readers how to create a “Conscious Spending Plan.”

“Create a budget” is the beloved mantra of personal finance advisers (127), but most people fail to maintain a budget for longer than two days. 80% of people polled say that they have a budget, but the truth is that nobody ever makes a budget and sticks to it. Sethi’s solution is to abolish budgets and instead create a Conscious Spending Plan built on “cutting costs mercilessly on the things you don’t love, but spending extravagantly on the things you do” (129). A Conscious Spending Plan gives readers permission to say yes to the things they care about rather than asking themselves to comply with draconian budgets.

After differentiating between being cheap and spending consciously, Sethi draws character sketches of three friends who consciously spend: The first spends $5,000 per year on shoes but lives with a roommate and eats for free at work; the second spends $21,000 a year on going out, guilt-free, but he doesn’t feel the need to take overseas vacations or buy decorations for his apartment; the third is a nonprofit employee who makes $40,000 but saves $6,000 a year by cooking at home and sharing rent in a small apartment.