How Your Friend Group Influences How You Spend and Save

When Sandy Smith’s stepfather lost his job during the Great Recession, she found herself supporting multiple family members and two households.

Her family, which emigrated from Jamaica, had always been frugal, but to make her budget work, she became a “crazy personal finance person” for her friend group. She kept a binder of coupons and let her friends know what deals they should check out, bought her clothes at Walmart, plugged the holes in her shoes with cardboard and skipped vacations for years while her friends traveled.

Her experiences led Ms. Smith, 48, to start a personal finance website called Yes I Am Cheap in 2008.

“There definitely is a negative connotation with being cheap, and that’s why I embraced it,” Ms. Smith said. “Let me not even play with the word frugal — I’m cheap,” she said. “I had to be.”

She started a Facebook Messenger group among her close friends, an annual Zoom pajama party to set financial goals and quarterly check-ins to discuss their finances. Ms. Smith has gone from being $200,000 in debt to having a net worth of more than a million dollars. Friends who initially thought she was “out of her mind” now come to her for advice.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/30/business/friends-spending-habits.html