The one change that worked: I began listing everything I bought – and finally got my spending under control | Life and style
SSometimes, you do not realize that the habit is strange until it reminds it accidentally and people stare for you as if you were a second head. Last year, I mentioned my shopping lists in front of my father. These menus, stored in the Notes application on my phone, is not the place where I write the things I want to buy (although I have one of these too). Instead, it is an accurate record of everything I already bought.
One list is for grocery stores, divided into categories (dairy, fresh vegetables, and cans) to detect everything I have in the refrigerator and the cabinet at any specific time. Another list covers almost everything. There are sections of books, makeup, clothes, various practical elements (batteries, vacuum cleaner filters, new bike lock) and more. Do not occupy transnational purchases that do not occupy space in my life – ready -made meals coffee, magazines and bus prices – in the list. But almost everything does.
“This is strange,” my father said, mysteriously horrific, when I explained the lists on him. “I mean, what is the point?”
What is the point? In short, the lists help me to feel control. I started them before the epidemic, when I felt that I was losing the path to where my money was exactly. I am an unorganized person and chaos vulnerable to buying the motivation and will not track, for example, whether you have already bought oat milk this week.
I can’t remember where I got the idea. Keeping a written record for your spending is a somewhat standard advice, but I do not write prices (my bank application shows me the amount of what I spent on different categories every month). My lists are a reminder of what I bought, and not the amount of what I spent. I quickly realized that this direct penetration could help me avoid unnecessary purchases. For example: If my grocery menu has a lot of vegetables that suffer from the refrigerator, but there are no granules, then I know what I should give priority to my weekly food store
Another list helps me resist more trivial spending. As the millennial generation, I grew up to see shopping as an entertainment activity, and I think I always have the desire to waste money on things that I do not need and I cannot really bear – a new top here, an expensive moisturizer – as a shortcut to feel confident, trust or contentment. Now, when I feel The seventies shirt attracted a broadcasterI can look at my list and see that I already added two new halls to my confined cabinet this year. Often, this reminder is sufficient to make me stay away from re -sale applications and find something else to do.
The menus did not absorb all joy from shopping. I am still vulnerable to the unexpected exaggeration of luxury or medieval foods – regardless of what my list says, I will never feel as if I had enough old jackets. But in a world that makes it targeted advertisements and payments that do not come into contact with them to spend them fraught with risks without thinking, I am happy because I found a strategy that helps me put more thinking about what I buy.
