It is so easy to spend money. A few quid here and there, a trip to the corner shop to pick up some milk, walking past a supermarket and grabbing something different for dinner or buying a pack of crisps as a snack over lunch. None of these things cost a great deal of money but if you find yourself spending a few pounds each day, over the course of a month you could have spent over £100, or even more, on pretty much nothing.
The thing is, spending money in this way becomes a habit. Having a little plastic card in your wallet or purse makes buying stuff a thing of ease. You no longer have to get cash out of the hole in the wall and when the money has run out, it’s gone.
The problem then lies when you have to budget really tightly and can’t afford to spend money here, there and everywhere.
When spending money becomes a habit, how can you break the cycle of spending which may have become like an addiction?
We often define our financial lives by how much we make. But what we never do is define our financial lives by how much we spend. I believe we’ve got it all backwards. So did two Canadian roommates who challenged themselves to spend no money for an entire year. Did they fail? Of course, but they did spend significantly less than in previous years. They stopped defining their lives by what they made and started defining their lives by what they could avoid spending, or in other words, save.
It violates my belief system and my budget, but I do it anyway.
It's a quick and easy way to make them feel happy (temporarily) and rewarded ("100 percent on your spelling test! Here's a cheap plastic token of my pride!").
And the items they covet are relatively inexpensive and benign: books, Hot Wheels, headbands, more markers to keep their other 6,000 markers company
As the start of 2016 approached, my thoughts inevitably turned to New Year's Resolutions, and all the ways I was going to start afresh, and 'improve' my life in 2016. The only problem was that I have always thought that I am not really that great at the whole New Year's Resolution thing, and that like many, I start off with all good intentions, only to fall back to old familiar habits within a week or two. But then a friend reminded me that actually, I can be pretty good (stubborn!) at sticking to resolutions, and I kept a really huge one, but it just happened that it didn't coincide with New Year.
