In the battle against spending the biggest enemy is temptation and
your only ally is your willpower which, let’s face it, has a tendency to
wimp out at the last minute. Sometimes, to win a losing fight, you need
to get creative so when a friend said she tracked every cent she spent,
I figured I’d give it a go too. And I did… for 6 long months.
I set up a spreadsheet in Excel
..and set about recording every single thing I spent money on, from
the monthly rent to the banana I bought on the way to work. I was
vigilant; no cent would escape my notice! But did it work? Well, yeah,
actually it did!
At first glance
I wouldn’t have believed that the simple act of writing things down
would be an incentive to spend less, but after the initial shock of what
a spendthrift I was ($91 on underwear I didn’t even need, what the…?). I
started to get a little thrill on the days when I didn’t buy anything
unnecessary and after a month or so of tracking but what was really
interesting was that I noticed I was buying something at least every
day. Little things, mostly groceries, but I could do without them and
all of a sudden, now, there was a reason to cut back!
The reason so many of us get away with sneaky spending
Is that there’s no-one there to see it. Only we know we’re breaking our budget
and we tell ourselves sweet little lies to hide it from ourselves. “Oh,
but I need some more hair product”, or, “I feel like Mexican tonight,
we’ll just have that other food another night”. We then conveniently
forget all about it in a mass case of financial amnesia and can’t
understand why we still seem to be out of pocket!
Well, if you’re anything like me
(slightly obsessive compulsive and in constant need of approval) you
may just benefit from writing all your spending down too. Once the facts
were there in front of me in black Times New Roman, there was no
arguing with the truth. Rather than lying, instead, I started trying to
impress the authoritative aspect of myself seeing how little I could
spend and very quickly I realised with a little extra willpower, I could
out-cheap myself easily.
Sometimes in the fight to control ourselves, we need to get creative
and if appealing to a disciplinarian side of your psyche works, then I
say run with it! I don’t need to record everything I spend anymore but I
know if things get out of control, I can always call on my stricter
side to pull me back in to line
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