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With everything going online—including baking and shopping—we’re more disconnected from our finances than ever before, making it easy to overspend without realizing it. While some level of spending is necessary, shopping for non-essentials like clothes or home goods can be a psychological response to certain emotional triggers like a stressful day at work or boredom. Compulsive shopping is a difficult habit to break.
Sound like you? Then, a no-spend week or month may be exactly what you need to get your financial health back on track. Are you up for it?
A no-spend challenge is committing to only spend money on necessities for a time. When you hear “no spend,” you may wonder how it’s possible to spend no money at all. Of course, there are expenses you simply can’t avoid like your rent—sadly, doing a no-spend challenge won’t earn you much sympathy from your landlord. But there are other things that you can live without like new clothes or takeout. Decide which categories are essential and which are off-limits before starting your challenge.
Some signs that you might benefit from a no-spend challenge:
There aren’t any hard and fast rules for a no-spend challenge because everyone’s situation is unique. You need to allow for the essentials like bills and groceries. From there, customize your own rules, including what you allow yourself to buy during the challenge and how long the challenge will last. It can be as short as a weekend or as long as a month—some people do a whole year! If you need some inspiration, author and blogger Cait Flanders wrote about her experience of not shopping for one year in her memoir The Year of Less.
Take these rules as a guide and feel free to tweak them as appropriate:
Preparation is the key to success in most of life, but especially when managing money. In addition to setting the rules, there are a few other things to think through before embarking on your no-spend challenge. A few exercises on the first page of the No-Spend Challenge Workbook can help you:
Simply download and print the No-Spend Challenge Workbook to plan and complete your own challenge. You can put the worksheets in a binder by hole-punching them or put them on your fridge as a daily reminder.
Instead of clicking “buy now” or swiping your credit card without a thought, write down what you’re thinking of buying instead. In delaying your purchase, you’re stopping yourself from impulsively buying things you really don’t need.
Whenever you feel the urge to spend, ask yourself a few questions first:
Between email and social media, you’re constantly bombarded with advertisements for the biggest sales and newest items. It can be hard to stick to the challenge when that shirt you’ve had your eye on goes on sale and you just “have to have it.” It’s impossible to escape all ads, but you don’t have to subject yourself to quite so many. Here are a few ways to cut down on your exposure to ads:
If shopping has become more of a lifestyle than something you do out of necessity, boredom may be a challenge you want to overcome. Don’t make things harder for yourself by window shopping to pass time. Instead, find a new hobby or check out free activities nearby. Browse festivals.com or search your city plus “fun, free, cheap” to find some local events to attend. Or check out this list of ideas to get you started:
After you finish your no-spend challenge, first, congratulate yourself —it’s no easy feat. But don’t let all your new knowledge be forgotten.
Hopefully, in doing a no-spend week or month, you’ve learned some things about yourself and your spending triggers. Understanding when you feel like spending for emotional reasons versus when you actually need things will help you evaluate purchases in the future. You’ll also be full of newfound confidence from setting your financial goals and crushing them. Let that momentum carry you through the next few months of saving and paying off credit card debt. Before you know it, your days of living paycheck to paycheck will be over.
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