No Buy Year Completed! - (Buying Nothing for a Year was Life Changing!)

i recently uploaded a video talking about how i purchased a pair of jeans the first piece of clothing i'd purchased in two years what i didn't tell you in that video was that that pair of jeans also represents the end of a no by year i have now successfully completed a year-long no buy and in today's video i just wanted to share with you some of the lessons that i've learned over the last year of buying pretty much nothing i want to be really transparent with you with my reasons for doing a no-by-year and my main motivation if not my only motivation was to save money now when we went into the first lockdown just over a year ago it was pretty obvious that sadly some people were going to lose their jobs now my job entails going into nhs buildings which for the most part over the last year has not been at all possible so i was a little bit concerned that my job could go and nobody in my industry would be hiring and therefore i wanted to protect myself as much as i could from potential financial ruin and so i thought to myself if i could get myself to a point where i was saving 50 of my take-home salary then for every month that i did that i could almost buy myself a month of being out of work it made sense in my head and you know because i just wanted to make sure that i would be okay if the worst happened now unless you're some kind of prepper with a large stockpile of course there were still things that i needed to buy but my nobel rules were pretty simple i could only buy things that i absolutely needed and i wasn't allowed to buy things just because i wanted them so over the last year i did purchase food but no takeaways no fast food no restaurants no meals out etc and and i did buy cleaning products and i did buy personal care personal hygiene items that had ran out i wasn't allowed to just buy i don't know a new bubble bath because it smelled nice i could only buy bubble bath when the one that i had had run out hopefully that makes sense i think one of the biggest things i'll take away from the last year and doing the no buy is just how much money we can spend on nonsense on things that we don't even realize that we're buying those kind of little impulse purchases now i have been doing what i would call aggressively saving for the last three years because i'd set myself quite a large financial goal of saving a deposit for a house so you know i've not been being frivolous with my spending anyway and yet by doing the no buy by not shopping by making savings in other areas i have managed to save an additional 300 pounds a month how is that even possible i mean admittedly i've probably saved a little bit on fuel by not being able to kind of go anywhere but 300 pounds a month that is that's three and a half thousand pounds a year what was i spending it on it wasn't clothes it wasn't makeup it wasn't skin care that to me is just a crazy amount of money so i really will beware of those little oh well just oh it's only three pounds oh i'll just get that and really think about whether i need it because that extra three and a half thousand pounds could come in incredibly handy um for all sorts of reasons so yeah definitely beware of the impulse purchases so the second thing i'll take away from this last year is that feelings cannot be fixed with things now i know looking back uh certainly in my younger years i definitely would shop to distract myself from how i was feeling so feeling sad buy a new dress don't feel pretty buy some more makeup i'm feeling bored let's go online have a scroll on my favorite websites and see what we can buy and just distract myself from the feeling but buying things never really works it just merely distracts you from the feeling at the time now the last year for most of us has been filled with lots of unpleasant feelings but there is absolutely nothing i could have purchased that would have fixed any of that now i can't say that after a year of not shopping that i am any better at dealing with those feelings it's probably something that i will always have to work on and whilst i don't think there's anything wrong with owning things or with shopping or with even merely distracting yourself from a horrible situation or a horrible feeling i know now that if i find myself shopping that i will ask myself why this thing that i want to buy do i need it and if i don't need it do i want it do i love it do i feel that this item will bring some value to my life and if it doesn't fill any of those things if i think that i am shopping because i'm bored then it's probably not a good idea it's probably best to just step away and maybe see friends deal with um you know deal with those feelings in a different way so the third thing i'll take away from the last year is that saving money has lots of benefits over things now i've long since believed in having an emergency fund especially as i've been self-employed at times in the past and i know how vital that money can be but over and above having an emergency fund i've never really valued saving until the last couple of years but doing the no buy this year has really consolidated what i already felt about saving it can offer you so many more benefits over and above just being able to replace the washing machine if it breaks firstly it offers a much greater sense of security so if i was to lose my job tomorrow obviously it would be awful especially in the current climate because it would be really difficult to find another job but by saving money and living within my means then it massively reduces that anxiety that worry that panic because you know by having a really good safety net from saving money then you know you'll be okay secondly it also offers you a much greater feeling of control now let's say for example you're in a job and you absolutely hate it now most of us would never do this because most of us just keep putting ourselves through the pain to keep that money coming in but if you've saved money if you've not been shopping so much and you've got a nice cushion if you couldn't stand that job for even a millisecond longer you are in a position that you could potentially say up yours and quit and even though you might never do it knowing that you could makes you feel so much less trapped and it feels so good thirdly it gives you options too so let's say a business opportunity came your way but it would mean that maybe for the first year you'd be earning a lot less well you might decide if you've saved money if you've got that um bolster again that you could take that risk that you could take that opportunity and pursue your dreams or perhaps if you've been saving and you just get used to living with less then you might be able to take a lower paid job that perhaps would offer you more fulfillment or maybe give you more time to spend with family staying away from social media helps now i was quite late to the social media arena i was very resistant to joining anything but i was hounded by a couple of my friends and eventually i caved and joined facebook and when i first joined it i absolutely loved it like i spent so much time on there it was so nice reconnecting with friends from all over the world from friends i'd met on holidays as a teenager from you know catching up with old school friends it was lovely and most of the time people just posted general pictures of what they were doing you know some of my friends from school posted pictures of their children and it was really sweet and lovely and just quite nice but then over time it it changed and people were posting pictures of their new house their fancy new car and their incredibly expensive watch and it became just this place to show off and i just didn't really like it and then instagram is that on steroids so i definitely think that it's helped over the last year to stay away from social media which was a decision i made due to how i was feeling with the lockdowns and so on but i just think that when you don't concern yourself with what other people have and what other people are doing then you're much more content with what you have and what you're doing you don't need to compare yourself at all and i think that that leads to less shopping and more happiness whilst i won't be doing another no buy for the next 12 months i'm fairly confident that my shopping will be fairly minimal whilst i've been really lucky to keep my job this far and fingers crossed we'll hopefully continue to do so no one knows what could happen in the coming months i think as people keep saying these really are unprecedented times so i can't imagine that anything that i could buy now would feel at all important if in a few months i'm thinking about how i'm going to pay the bills so i'm probably going to keep that shopping really really minimal also in the last year by doing the new buy and by using other money-saving strategies i ended up saving 60 of my take-home salary that is crazy to me i i would never have even thought that that was possible and you know if i had to just run the sums on paper so it's it's crazy how much all these little things can add up and i think that doing this and being able to save that amount of my salary each month is probably going to change my relationship with money and shopping forever so in some ways you could say that it's been life-changing okay so if you've made it this far thank you so much for watching as always i love to hear from you guys in the comments have you ever done a no buy are you considering doing one do you think you need to do one are you wanting to save more money i always love to hear your experiences again thank you so much for watching and i look forward to seeing you in the next one bye now

Channel: Kirsty Kirby

Views: 919,262

Keywords: no buy year uk, no buy year, year long no buy, minimalism, extreme saving money, saving money, no shopping for a year, I quit shopping, no spend year, personal finance

Id: 1wPBFWFf59U

Length: 10min 0sec (600 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 01 2021