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I launched my first-ever book not too long ago. A book I started writing straight after giving birth, squeezed in around a newborn and a business I was still building from scratch. And if you’d asked me how it felt, I probably would have shrugged and said something like “yeah, it’s done now.”
That’s the truth of it. I don’t tend to feel like my achievements are achievements. They just feel like the next thing to tick off the to-do list. Quitting my job. Building a community of over 150,000 people. Writing a book. All of it just felt like relief that it was done, then straight on to the next thing.
Here’s what gets me though. If a friend told me she’d done any one of those things, I’d be telling her to shout it from the rooftops. So why can’t I do that for myself? And if you’ve ever hit a savings goal, cleared a debt, or landed your first payment from a side hustle and felt, well, not much, you’re probably in the same boat. This is about why that happens, and how to actually celebrate financial wins when you get them, instead of just moving straight on to the next number on the list.
Why It’s So Hard to Celebrate Your Own Wins
I’ve thought about this a lot. Why aren’t my own achievements worthy of celebrating in my brain, when someone else’s exact same win would have me buying the prosecco?
My best guess is that when you’re building something from the ground up, with nothing handed to you, your achievements stop feeling like wins and start feeling like survival. They’re just the next vital step to get where you need to be. Nothing’s ever felt optional. It’s felt essential. And essential things don’t get a party. They get crossed off and forgotten.
There’s an actual name for part of this pattern. Psychologists call it the arrival fallacy, a term coined by Harvard-trained psychologist Dr Tal Ben-Shahar. It’s the belief that once you reach a goal, the happiness will finally arrive and stay. In reality, you get a brief lift, then you’re straight back to your usual baseline, or worse, already eyeing the next target. If you’ve ever hit a big goal and felt strangely flat about it within days, that’s likely what’s going on. It isn’t that the achievement wasn’t big enough. It’s that your brain was never designed to sit still and enjoy “arrived” for very long.
Add in a bit of imposter syndrome, the nagging sense that you got lucky rather than earned it, and you’ve got a fairly common combination for anyone who’s built something for themselves rather than had it handed to them.
Why This Hits Even Harder When It’s About Money
Money makes this pattern worse, I think, because so many of us were never taught that it’s allowed to feel good.
If you grew up in a scarcity mindset, where money was something to grip onto rather than something that flows, celebrating a win with it can feel almost reckless.
You paid off the credit card, so why would you spend anything to mark it? You hit your savings target, so surely the sensible thing is to just set the next target and keep going? I talk about this shift from scarcity to abundance a lot, including in the book, and it’s one thing to understand it in theory. It’s another to actually let yourself enjoy a win without immediately feeling like you need to earn the next one.
This especially applies if you’ve built your income yourself, through a side hustle, freelancing, or your own small business, rather than through a steady pay rise from an employer.
When every pound felt like it came from your own graft, it’s tempting to treat every milestone as proof you need to work harder, rather than proof you’ve already done something worth being proud of.
Financial Milestones Worth Celebrating
It’s worth actually naming what counts, because I think a lot of us walk straight past genuine wins without clocking them as wins at all.
A few examples:
- Your first payment from a side hustle: Whether that’s your first Vinted sale, your first UGC brief, or your first client, that first bit of money you made yourself is worth more than the number on the screen.
- Hitting your first proper savings milestone: Your first £1,000, or simply your first month of not dipping into an emergency fund you’ve been building.
- Paying off a debt in full: A credit card, a loan, an overdraft you’ve finally cleared. This one especially deserves marking, because debt repayment rarely feels exciting while you’re doing it.
- Making your first investment: Even a small one. If you’ve never invested before and finally opened an account, Trading212 currently offers a free share when you sign up through my link, which is a nice, genuinely free way to mark the occasion of starting. If you’re still weighing up whether to put spare cash into investing or towards your mortgage, I’ve written a full guide to overpaying your mortgage versus investing that might help you decide.
- Getting a pay rise, or landing a new client at a better rate: Especially if you had to ask for it.
- Quitting something that wasn’t serving you, to build something of your own: This one doesn’t come with a bank balance attached straight away, but it’s arguably the biggest financial decision most of us ever make.
- Finishing something you’ve been working on for ages: A course, a qualification, a side project, a book.
None of these need to be huge. A £50 emergency fund is still an emergency fund. The point isn’t the size of the number. It’s that you did the thing, on purpose, and it’s allowed to count.
How to Actually Celebrate a Financial Win (Without Blowing the Budget)
This is the bit most guides get wrong, in my opinion. They tell you to “treat yourself” without any acknowledgement that undoing your win by overspending on the celebration defeats the point. Here’s what actually works, and doesn’t cost much or anything at all:
- Say it out loud: Tell your partner, a friend, or your family. Not to brag, just to let the win exist outside your own head for a second. It’s a small thing, but it’s often the step people skip entirely.
- Write it down: A single line in your notes app: “Today I paid off the last of my credit card.” You don’t need a gratitude journal. You need proof, for future you, that this happened.
- Mark it visually before you get there: A savings tracker, a chart on the fridge, a jar you add coins to. Seeing the gap close is part of what makes the eventual win feel real rather than just a number that changed.
- Plan the celebration in advance, as part of the goal: Decide before you hit the target what “celebrating” will look like, whether that’s your favourite takeaway, a night off cooking, or an hour with no plans and no to-do list. Deciding in advance stops you talking yourself out of it when the moment actually arrives.
- Give yourself a proper pause: Not a “well done, next” pause. An actual few minutes where you’re not already thinking about the next goal. This is the one I’m worst at, and the one that seems to matter most.
The Wins I’m Finally Learning to Celebrate
We’ve got five years of The Savvy Spender coming up, and I’ve properly vowed to myself that I’ll celebrate that one. We’re also just over 150,000 followers now, which honestly still doesn’t feel real to type. And then there’s the book, which you can get a closer look inside here if you’re curious what’s actually in it.
None of this happened overnight, and none of it was handed to me. I started earning extra money on maternity leave with basically nothing, and if you’re in that position now, here’s how I first went about it. Everything since has been built from that same starting point, one essential next step at a time, which I think is exactly why none of it has felt like cause for a party until now.
If you’ve built your own income from nothing too, that survival-mode achievement pattern will probably sound familiar. It’s time both of us stopped treating our wins like they were just the minimum expected, and started treating them like the actual achievements they are.
Building the Habit of Celebrating as You Go
The easiest way to break this pattern isn’t to wait for one enormous win and throw a huge party for it. It’s to get into the habit of small, consistent acknowledgement.
Celebrate the £50 as genuinely as you plan to celebrate the £5,000, because the habit you’re building is the same either way. The size of the win matters far less than whether you actually let yourself notice it.
FAQs on How to Celebrate Financial Wins
Why do I find it so hard to celebrate my own achievements?
It’s a genuinely common pattern, especially for people who’ve built something from scratch rather than had it handed to them. Psychologists call part of this the arrival fallacy, where reaching a goal doesn’t bring the lasting happiness you expected, so your brain moves straight on to the next target instead of pausing to enjoy the one you just hit.
What actually counts as a financial milestone worth celebrating?
Anything you worked towards on purpose, whatever the size. Your first side hustle payment, clearing a debt, hitting a savings target, or making your first investment all count. The size of the number matters far less than the fact you set out to do it and did.
How can I celebrate a money win without spending loads?
Say it out loud to someone, write it down, or plan a low-cost treat in advance, like a favourite takeaway or an evening with no plans. The celebration doesn’t need to cost anything to count. What matters is that you actually pause and acknowledge it, rather than moving straight on to the next goal.
Is it a bad idea to reward yourself after reaching a savings goal?
Not if the reward is planned and sits within your budget. A small, decided-in-advance treat that doesn’t undo the progress you made is a genuinely useful way to reinforce the habit of saving, rather than something to feel guilty about.
I’ve never really celebrated anything financial before. Where do I start?
Start small and start now, with whatever your most recent win actually was, even if it happened months ago. Say it out loud once, write one line about it, and decide how you’ll mark the next one before you get there. The habit matters more than the scale of the first attempt.
