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When it comes to living a frugal life and cultivating a positive relationship with money, one of the biggest hurdles to overcome is the urge that many of us feel to overspend on a habitual basis.
From time to time, everyone needs to spend a bit of money on something fun or uplifting – and we certainly all have various obligations we need to fulfil, financially.
Whether you want more money set aside for those special occasions, or whether you need to send money to Vietnam to relatives, reducing the desire to overspend gratuitously can be very beneficial.
Here are a few tips to help you reduce the urge to overspend.
Keep your home tidy and aesthetically pleasing so that you can really enjoy what you already have
A lot of the time, the urge to overspend is really an urge to escape from an uncomfortable or frustrating environment or state of mind, by purchasing items that you feel – often on a more or less subconscious level – will help you to experience an enhanced sense of well-being.
Keeping your home tidy and aesthetically pleasing is a very good step to take in order to help you better appreciate what you already have, so that you can experience an enhanced sense of well-being in the here and now, rather than feeling driven to make impulse purchases in order to achieve that result.
Often, if your home is well arranged and organised, you’ll be able to better cherish, notice, and make use of belongings you’ve had for years that would normally have “flown beneath your radar.”
Focus more on “doing” and “being” than “having,” as a rule
Overspending – and especially impulse buying – is generally a matter of trying to enrich your life by “having” more, rather than by focusing more directly on what you are “doing” and who you are “being.”
While money can help you to “do” certain things, of course, a lot of the deepest meaning and satisfaction that you are likely to experience in life will tend to come from activities and ways of interacting with the world that are more or less completely separated from financial matters.
Don’t get these different “modes” of interacting with the world confused.
Set yourself savings goals and emphasise quality rather than quantity
A lot of overspending can be linked back to an approach to your possessions that emphasises quantity over quality.
In other words – feeling that you need to have the newest of everything at any given moment, in order to be properly satisfied.
By emphasizing “quality” instead – in the sense of buying things that involve more craftsmanship and that are built to last for a longer time – you can do a lot to remove yourself from this habitual spending cycle.
Of course, these high-quality items will tend to cost a good deal in and of themselves – which is why you should set yourself savings goals to help enable yourself to purchase them over time, in a responsible manner.
