To spend money like water is to spend large amounts of it freely, often wastefully, without much thought for whether it is being spent wisely. It is used of a person who spends more than they should be saving, and just as often of governments, councils or businesses that burn through budgets with little apparent restraint. The phrase usually carries a note of disapproval, pointing to spending that looks careless or excessive rather than spending that is simply generous.
Cambridge Dictionary defines it as meaning to regularly spend large amounts of money, giving as an example someone whose wife “spends money like water.” Longman’s Dictionary of Contemporary English is more explicit about the tone, describing the expression as being “used to show disapproval” when someone spends large amounts of something “when you should try to save it.” The logic of the image is straightforward: water, unlike most valuable things, flows away continuously and cannot be held onto, so money that goes the same way slips through the fingers rather than being kept or put to use.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘spend money like water’?
The origin of this particular simile is not well documented. Wiktionary treats it as an informal figure of speech rather than a fixed idiom with a traceable history, classing it simply as a way of describing spending a lot of money without concern over whether it is spent wisely. That classification fits the evidence available: there is no reliable first citation establishing when English speakers began pairing “spend” with “like water” in this exact form.
Some idiom aggregator sites claim that the broader figurative use of “like water” to suggest ease or abundance goes back to at least the late nineteenth century, but these sites give no primary source for the date, so the claim cannot be taken as established. Other similar accounts explain that the phrase draws on the image of water flowing effortlessly and without restriction, which accounts for the logic of the comparison without pointing to any documented first use.
What can be said with more confidence is that the phrase belongs to a small family of English similes built on water’s qualities, each one drawing on a different property of the substance to make its point. This one draws on the way water, once poured out, is gone for good, so it pictures money as something that disappears the moment it is spent rather than something that can be recovered or put by.