You do the responsible things. You work hard. You try to budget. You save where you can. And you check your balance, some of you religiously. After a recent direct deposit, today is one of the good days. The single number on your screen is higher than it's been in weeks. You should feel a sense of calm confidence, but you don't. Something is off. It's quietly nagging at you, but you can't articulate why.
You think: If my balance is positive, and these new shoes feel affordable, they probably are.
But, are they?
A bank balance measures quantity. It can't express commitment, priority, or time.
A bank balance is a dishonest number that—in truth—is lower than it appears. It reports how much money is in the account at a certain moment in time. It doesn't report what that money must do before more arrives. It doesn't know the next paycheck will be light because a shift got canceled. It doesn't know the car registration that just came in the mail is due on the 22nd. It doesn't know when the friend who borrowed $300 will pay it back. A bank balance measures quantity. It can't express commitment, priority, or time.
Commitment is what you've already promised the month. Priority is what must happen before anything else happens. Time is the gap between what's in the account now and what will be there two Fridays from now. A balance has no context for any of it.
This is the part that quietly takes the floor out from under you. The tool you're using to decide, your bank, isn't built to answer questions like, "Can I really afford this?" and "How will this purchase affect my next two weeks until I get paid again?" The balance can only tell you that right now, in this account, there is this much money. The 40 small obligations threaded through the next two weeks have to live in your head.
But your head isn't built to hold that ledger. Under uncertainty, your brain does something Daniel Kahneman and Shane Frederick described in 2002: it substitutes an easier question for the harder one. "Can I really afford this?" is hard. "Is my balance positive?" is easy. The substitution happens in a half-second, silently, and the answer only feels like an answer.
It's a reflex dressed up as a decision.
The usual answer to this is budgeting. The appeal is obvious. A budget supplies exactly what the balance won't: commitment, priority, time. But budgeting is a structure that doesn’t hold. Instead of bending to the demands of life, it breaks. A budget describes what the money should do before and what it does after the fact, but it has no power over what the money actually does. It handles the bookends, but can’t write the book. The utilities dollars and the impulse-buy dollars are still the same dollars in the same account. The card doesn't ask the budget for permission. It asks the balance. So, the substitution happens anyway, just with the added guilt that you paid a budgeting app for.
A budget handles the bookends, but can’t write the book.
The cost of that substitution usually doesn't arrive as a sudden catastrophe. It arrives as a feeling. A chronic unease about money that persists even when the numbers look like they're in your favor. And it isn't confined to one income level. Obligations scale with income. The mortgage replaces the rent. The college fund joins the car loan. The quarterly tax payment lands the same week as a kid's birthday. As earnings grow, so does the number of things the balance is being asked to hold. And the more layered those commitments become, the less a single number can speak to any of them. The unease doesn't dissolve at higher income; it often grows with it. These aren't careless people. Millions of them open their bank app every morning, find the same positive number, and still, somewhere underneath, they know the number isn't telling them what they need to know.
A bank balance can't know the whole truth, nor was it designed to. It's an incomplete number pretending to tell you what you can afford. A tool that gives you just one number skirts over the real question with no scrutiny. So, you toggle between your screen and your thoughts, trying to figure out how the rent, groceries, and birthday gift all fit inside the next two weeks. You're using a mental calculator because the tools you use can't make tradeoffs for all the different demands that are competing for your money.
If you feel unsettled about your money despite doing everything right, the unease is a signal: your bank has reached the limit of what it was ever built to do. The lie is in the instrument. It's misinforming you. You deserve the truth.
Want proof? See for yourself. Open your banking app and ask yourself, "how is this helpful?"
Sources.
- Kahneman, D., & Frederick, S. (2002). Representativeness revisited: Attribute substitution in intuitive judgment. In T. Gilovich, D. Griffin, & D. Kahneman (Eds.), Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive judgment (pp. 49–81). Cambridge University Press. cambridge.org/core/books/abs/heuristics-and-biases/representativeness-revisited
