In a world of contactless payments, seemingly unlimited credit, and pressure to buy it’s not surprise that people are choosing to splurge rather than save.
Add to this the feeling, at least for younger generations, that saving for a house deposit or pension is such a gargantuan effort that it’s not even worth starting and you have a recipe for financial disaster.
We live in a world where our main role seems to be as consumers, constantly being advertised to and encouraged to buy but I don’t think this has to be the case.
After a year-long experiment where I challenged myself to spend nothing except on my standard bills and basic groceries, I know that we don’t have to be caught on the consumer treadmill and that small changes to our spending habits can make a huge difference.
On Black Friday 2015 I decided to opt out of spending for a year. I could still pay the bills I needed to live, including mortgage, utilities, and council tax, and continue to pay charitable donations.
I also needed to eat and had a basic grocery budget to cover three meals a day, essential toiletries such as soap and toothpaste, and household items like washing powder for clothes. My husband joined this part of the challenge and over the year we cut down our grocery bill to £31.60 a week on average for the both of us.
There was no budget for anything else, which meant no more takeaway coffees, pints down the pub, cinema trips, online shopping splurges or meals out. I didn’t even have a budget for bus fare so would travel everywhere on my bicycle for 12 months.
Martin met a good middle-class family for a media money makeover. First, they admitted shame at £60,000 credit-card debt, a sum that mathematically would take them two years of after-tax income to repay even if they’d no bills to pay or food to buy.
Yet what they initially hid from Martin, and themselves, was a further jaw-dropping £120,000 of their mortgage had originally been splurged on plastic then shifted onto the home loan.
That’s £180,000 overspending in less than a decade, yet these weren’t obviously profligate folk. Like many, they’d simply stumbled into the trap of wrongly believing they were wealthy and tried to give their family the best. Inevitably, solving such gargantuan financial indiscipline just takes two simple words....
STOP SPENDING!
That’s easy to say and a nightmare to do. Yet in their case an abrupt spending defibrillation was the only way. To get them back on track, they needed to simply vow not to lay out for anything barring food, heat and essential bills. For most people, that's unnecessary, but get it wrong and things can get that bad.
Surely it's only a little debt?
Putting a little debt on cards may not seem too bad, yet if it's unplanned and not budgeted for, it's simply willy-nilly overspending, and you’re setting yourself up for a disaster, and not just financially. Too many times I’ve seen the impact debt crisis has on homes, family, mental health and relationships.
You may feel this is over-dramatising. Yet when there’s no money left, you can’t borrow more, and the creditors are asking for money back which you’ve no ability to repay, it touches every element of your life.
The danger is what’s called a ‘debt spiral’.
A mother-of-two who spent £5,000 over the Christmas period is on course to spend no money at all in the whole of January.
Jackie Mather has spent the whole month doing chores and various other jobs in exchange for food and everyday supplies in a bid not to spend a single penny.
The 55-year-old from Bramcote Hills has offered ironing services, private tuition, bathroom cleaning and car cleaning. She has given up luxuries such as lunch out with friends, and has even gone as far as running to her friends' homes instead of spending money on petrol driving there.
Having been a personal financial journalist in London for the past 10 years, 'my friends, family and colleagues assumed I was brilliant with money – but that wasn't strictly true,' Michelle McGagh explains in her latest Telegraph essay. After noticing she'd lately spent thousands of pounds on completely 'unnecessary' things (coffee, meals out, clothes), she decided to commit to not spending for an entire year — starting on Black Friday 2015.
The story of my 200-day Buy-Nothing-New challenge doesn’t start with an object or a possession. It starts with my dad, many months ago.
My father had been living with me as he went through chemotherapy treatments. He was fighting a melanoma which had spread. It was a stressful time, but it was bittersweet. Thinking of these times quickly brings tears of simultaneous sadness and gratitude to my eyes.
After months, my father was declared palliative and passed away less than a month later.
The exercise proved much harder than Simpson had expected, which she details in her book “My Year of Buying Nothing.” Here’s a few things she says she learned along the way.
1) It’s the little purchases that are hardest to give up
Simpson will admit she was a bit of a shopaholic before she began her shopping diet. Not the kind who bought designer purses, but the kind who always picked up little things she probably didn’t need -- too many eyeliner pencils and magazines, for example; nifty kitchen gadgets; a nice tie for her husband.
It was those small, mundane items that were hardest to stop buying, Simpson says. But she also believes her biggest chunk of savings over the year came just from putting an end to these impulse purchases.
“It’s really easy to grab that little tchotchke that’s just going to look so cute on your daughter’s wall, but it’s that kind of thing that does you in. The $15 purchase is way more dangerous,” she said.
2) The compulsion to buy is hard to resist
Even though Simpson was committed to buying nothing, she noticed her grocery bill started creeping up at the beginning of that first year.
What she realized was that she was buying all sorts of fancy cheeses, jams and other delectables she didn’t really need because she was trying to offset her “purchasing deprivation” by indulging herself in other ways -- in this case, fancy foods.
Simpson believes some part of her was having trouble breaking the instinct “to bring home a harvest,” as she says, and that it was an addiction she needed to break.
“I think we as a species are hard-wired to be hunter-gatherers but we’ve turned that very natural instinct into some pretty unhealthy acquisitional obsessions,” she said. “I found that in myself and I see it all around me.”
The solution for her newfound fancy food addiction was a simple one: instead of bringing a debit card to the supermarket, she set a strict budget and only carried cash.
3) There's more leisure time when you’re not shopping
One thing Simpson learned was how much time is lost every year to shopping. That time gets wasted scouring store aisles, window shopping, clipping coupons, or driving from store to store in search of that perfect thing at the perfect price.
All that time gets gifted back to you when you are no longer focused on buying stuff, she says.
Simpson spent her newfound leisure time reading, strolling the beach with her grandson, cooking more from scratch, gardening, and even getting back into knitting and painting.
“You find yourself finding better ways to spend your time when you’re not scouring the malls for that perfect outfit or lawn ornament,” she says.
4) There is rarely a reason to ever buy new
A year with nothing new forced Simpson to come up with creative solutions for everyday problems. When her dishcloths wore out, she knit new ones. When her dishwasher broke, she washed dishes by hand. When her shirts become stained, she covered them with scarves or sweaters.
Rather than buy gifts, she made jellies and fudge, painted watercolours and cards and even regifted toiletries that sat unused in her cupboards. She bartered a few items and services using her baking skills and gardening seeds. She accepted the occasional donated used item. In short, Simpson learned there is pretty much nothing that can’t be fixed, borrowed, traded, or bought used.
“And all these things are very healthy; they force you to become imaginative and creative,” she says.
5) Anyone can learn new habits
What’s one thing Simpson learned about herself in her year year of buying nothing? “I learned that I can change, even at a mature age,” she says.
Whereas she once bought things just for fun, Simpson says she no longer buys just for the thrill of buying. Now, she tries to think each purchase through: Does she really need this thing or can she make do with what she has? How long will it get used before being thrown out? What effect will it have on the environment?
“It’s about rethinking how and why you consume the things you consume, rethinking all your habits and making better habits,” she says.
The lessons she learned from that year have stayed with her, Simpson says, but she will also admit her vow to resist the urge to shop is one she still has to work on.
“It doesn’t always come naturally -- especially when i see something adorable for a grandchild,” she says. “But I now stop and think. That’s what I’ve learned. Stop and think.”
Three years after embarking on a Make Do and Mend Life, it’s occurred to me that this is a post I’ve never written, and really should have: Why did we embark on our year of Buying Nothing New, and why do we continue to endeavour to live a pre-loved life?
I’ll start with a short bit about why we started our year, and then give ten reasons why buying nothing new is awesome, and we should all be doing it (bring on the revolution!!)
I get asked a lot what prompted me to want to see if we could spend a year without buying anything new.
I think it was a succession of little things, and there was a lightbulb moment, but I don’t think I was really looking at the big picture. I didn’t really see how Buying Nothing New tied into lots of the bigger problems affecting the world.
BigSmall was 3 at the time, and I remember very clearly suddenly realising that he was already tuned into our societal desire for ‘new stuff’. He had somehow taken on board the message that we need new stuff, more stuff, all the time. And he very vocally demanded it! It shocked me, that our society, or maybe our parenting, had made a three year old want new stuff, all the time. Had made him feel like his life would be better if he just had that new toy car, or that magazine.
I know now that it’s probably entirely normal 3 year old behaviour, but I still wonder where it comes from. Is it hard wired into our hunter gatherer DNA, or have we created it somehow?
There's nothing like a flood to shake up your life. In June 2013, I was 28 and working at the University of Calgary in Alberta in the alumni relations office. I'd spent a lot on my apartment, buying furniture, dishes, decor. I was going out probably five nights a week with friends. I'd shop for clothes to kill time. And I'm embarrassed to say how much I splurged on my hair (fine—$250 for cut and color). But just as I was packing to move to another place, there was a history-making flood. The city was underwater, and my new apartment was damaged; suddenly I was telling my friend Geoffrey, "I don't know where I'm going to live." He and his partner had just broken up, and he offered me his spare bedroom—with one condition: "You can't bring all of your stuff," he said.
A year without spending money revitalised my finances and changed my relationship with money for the better. However, you don’t have to give up splashing the cash completely in order to spend less and save more.
On Black Friday 2015, which fell on 27 November, I started a ‘no spend year’ as a challenge to myself to jump out of the consumer rat race and overpay my mortgage. I could still pay my bills, such as my mortgage, utilities and council tax, and I had a basic grocery budget, but everything else was off limits.
This meant no pints in the pub, new clothes, taxis, cinema trips or takeaways. I didn’t even have a budget for my bus fares so I travelled everywhere on my bicycle for a year, meaning I definitely didn’t miss my gym membership.
Over the year, my earnings – coupled with income from a lodger (a great way to boost your income if you have a spare room to rent) – meant I overpaid my mortgage by just over £22,000, cutting both the interest I will pay to the bank and the number of years I will pay my mortgage for.
I wanted in.
My husband thought I was insaneto suggest such an extreme challenge, but I felt compelled. “One month,” I explained. “I’ll try not to buy anything brand new for one month.”
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Well, friends, this is it – the final day of my yearlong shopping ban. I’ll be honest and say I feel like I’ve had a touch of writer’s block for the past month, because I’ve been waiting to write this post. Once I hit the 11-month mark, I knew it was going to be smooth sailing to the finish line, and I’ve been so anxious to share everything I’ve done and learned over the past year, as well as some of my plans for the future. Now that the last day is finally here, I think it’s safe to post this… (You may want to grab a cup of coffee and get comfortable. At over 6,000 words, this is the longest post I’ve ever published.)
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