SHOPAHOLIC TO MINIMALIST | Financial Independence

okay guys so this is a very exciting video for me to make because it's all about how I went from a absolute shopaholic to being able to slowly stop myself from overspending and how where I am now that I feel in control of the things that I'm buying I feel like I am able to better assess whether it's something I really want and I'm also going to tell you about a recent time that I have stopped myself from making a big purchase so let's talk about all the steps that it's going to take you in order to get to a point where you either can stop yourself from buying so much or you just stop wanting to buy things all together so let's start at the very beginning I very much was a Shopaholic I was the kind of person that I would go in stores with my friends and family and every time I walked out I would have something if I didn't have something you can bet that I would feel sad or depressed or generally just disappointed that I didn't walk out with something and that mind shift has completely changed I cannot tell you if you've never been a Shopaholic before if you've never felt like you were spending un uncontrollably how great it feels to be in control how great it feels to be able to say no I'm not buying something and not feel this sinking feeling when you leave so it's all a process it didn't happen overnight but let's start with a few things that I did start doing so the first thing that I really started thinking about was how much am I making an hour and man was that a big wakeup call from being a teacher that there's only so much money I was making an hour and how much money then am I going out and spending like it's water and it's just slipping right outside the door but what could I do with that money if I really started saving and assessing for what I wanted to really use it for as opposed to just buying a bunch of random things that in the future I'd be decluttering anyway so the first thing I want you to to do is really do a breakdown of how much money you make an hour so once you've done that and you know how much you make an hour I want you to really think about that while you are making a purchase that's going to be the first thing you're really going to think about as you are picking up that sweater and it's $339.99 how much money are you making an hour and is that hour that you had to be at work worth the sweater so that was the first thing that really helped to slow down my purchases was just really assessing how much money I was spending now I also started something where I started to write it down they say that's really helpful for our brains is to write things down so I'm sure you've heard about food journals but if you are somebody that is overspending and really wants to keep track take a little tiny notebook with you and actually assess what you are buying every time you buy something write it down and write how much it cost and that will kind of give you an idea of how much money is going out the door every single day because I know a lot of us will look on our credit card statement and be like oh my goodness I can't believe I spent that much money but really when you're writing it down in the moment I think it has a bit more of a shock factor that you are spending that much money so I really like to do this now with bigger purchases so I'll give you an example recently I really wanted to get an above ground pool um we live in Virginia and it's getting hot here and I just thought about all these great things that we could be doing if we had this big pool that my daughter could learn how to swim a little bit better and I could have fun in it so of course you know when you start to think about something you want especially those big things you start having all these ideas of how much better life is going to be and whatnot but as I was thinking about that I started to assess how much everything costs so we went to like Sam's Club and Costco and Walmart and Target and we were just looking everywhere at the kind of pool we wanted and how much money it was going to cost that is when the breakdown of how much I'd have to work in order to earn that pool that large large pool really started to hit home that it was going to take me a while to earn that much money and is it really worth it to me when we also have places that we've already joined like we belong to a place called Kings Dominion which is a kind of like a Adventure Park it has roller coasters it has water slid has a whole water area and it's about 30 minutes away from our house so we join that with a bunch of our friends every year and so my husband and I started talking about it finally and we was like but we already belong to this other thing that we've already paid for we really need a pool in the backyard just for the convenience factor when we already belong and have paid for for something else so that started to really backtrack us we started to talk ourselves back out of it instead of just making that very quick purchase we really started to assess is this worth our money so once my husband and I started talking about um how much the pool would cost and how much we'd have to work in order to buy the pool and everything that goes along with the pool like a ladder and the cleaning filter and all that kind of stuff that kind of domino effect into what I would say are the next questions that I ask myself and those next questions are extremely important if the money one doesn't hit you then these two should so the next questions that I'm going to ask myself are how am I going to take care of this and where is it going to go these are two questions that once I started to think about these questions every time I go shopping they have saved me thousands of dollars because I am at my court what probably most people would call a lazy person I am not someone who loves cleaning I don't want to spend my whole day cleaning I have already done that in my life I have spent so many nights and weekends cleaning my house and taking care of things that I just didn't even want didn't need didn't use but I had to take care of them so think about those things that you you are getting ready to buy and think about if it's clothing you're going to have to wash it you're going to have to dry it you're going to have to fold it you're going to have to put it in the drawer or hang it up and does it have a hanger does it have a place in the drawer that it's going to go are your drawers already stuffed do you have no hangers left so you're going to have to buy new hangers really think about the whole process that is bringing new things into your house so the pool obviously got us really thinking about where is it going to go so we started outside surveying is there a nice flat place that we can put the pool and what kind of leveling are we going to have to do outside so that the pool sits in a nice place and is there enough Sun I mean there was a million questions we started asking ourselves I really wanted to put it in the way back of our yard and that area is like a jungle so it was going to take a lot of work in order for it to go back there so once I answered that that was that was quite a headache but then I was like well how are we going to take care of it so we were going to have to buy pool cleaners and get one of those Scoopy things to clean it and I knew that and I knew that while in my head the fantasy of my daughter and I just playing in it and having a great time there were so many other aspects to this that I wasn't assessing in the very beginning when I was like yeah let's buy a pool let's go for it there were so many other layers to it and I think a lot of us forget that there is that factor of having to take care of things there is so much more that goes into owning something than just owning it I crave freedom I crave the ability to be able to do be able to chase dreams that I want to achieve things I want to do or even just to be able to sit quietly in my house for a couple of minutes hopefully and just be able to rest and think and not have to clean all of the time I was so sick of living in a home that I felt like was never done always had something else I had to be doing and while there still probably is always something I could be doing now that I live in a minimalist house there is so much less for me to do and there's so much less in my face all of the time that I can sit quietly and just process that I am not so overwhelmed that I can't shut off for a while when I need to it had me thinking so there's there's a a monk that I follow on YouTube if I can find some of his videos I will link them below because I absolutely love him he's amazing to listen to but I just would think back in the day when I first started listening to his YouTube videos years ago um I was like there's no way he would have reached the kind of Enlightenment he's reached now if he lived in my house because there was just no time to sit quietly there was no space to sit quietly and process things and so how much more peace I've been able to bring into my own home just by getting rid of some things and not bringing in so much extra I think one of the big problems that we have especially here in America I've noticed is that We crave that dopamine hit that you get when you go shopping so every time that we go out and we buy something you get an immediate like dopamine hit that excitement that happy level go goes up and our brains get excited they Spike it's awesome but what happens is that we get addicted to that dopamine hit and we feel like every time we're sad or we're happy we deserve to go get that little bit of excitement and while there is nothing wrong with buying things there is something fundamentally wrong if you have to live off of that very short high that you get when you go shopping because you know what it goes away so quickly a lot of times I'd find that I would buy something I'd get super excited and then by the time even I got to my car I throw it in the back seat and forget about it I wouldn't even bring it into the house often I'd bring in clothes and they would have the tags on them for weeks and I wouldn't be wearing them and then I'd end up getting rid of stuff that I never actually took the tags off of and that hopefully is a big red flag for you if you have a lot of things in your house that still have tags on them that still have the price on them that maybe you are buying things too quickly and you're living off of that excitement that you feel when you buy things and you're not really assessing why you're getting things so if you're new here my name is Becky truda and I'm a minimalist living a more simple lifestyle I like to talk about minimalism and decluttering and organizing our homes so that we can live bigger and better dreams for ourselves so if you think that's a great idea and you enjoy this video then make sure you subscribe to this little community and also if you are on a minimalist Journey with us throw a heart emoji down below to let us know that we're all in this together so if you're still having a really hard time with not overspending and you are putting all of these ideas into place as you go shopping then there are a few other things that you can do so something else that I have tried is just not keep any of my password or shipping in any website that I go on so if I'm going on to Amazon I have to log in completely and I have to add my shipping address so those things will really help you to build some barriers ear in front of you so that you don't just go and go scrolling through Amazon for hours at a time looking for things that you didn't even know you want of course I recommend also unsubscribing from any emails that might be tempting like I don't get emails from Target or any other place around me they immediately go into my junk mail if they happen to get by but I always unsubscribe from them as well so you just don't feel tempted you don't get that things are 50% off because even if something is 50% % off you're still having to spend the other 50% on something that you just don't need and another thing I like to do that really helped me in the beginning was to have a savings account that you are saving towards a goal so whether it's just a monetary goal like you want to save $1,000 in a month or two or if you have a goal of going somewhere so if you've seen any of my other videos you probably know that we love to travel we take my daughter at most of the places but we've been all over Europe and many places in the Caribbean the Bahamas South America and we just love learning about other people's cultures so in order to do that you need some money and what I have found is that saving towards that goal of traveling and having a plan a place that we want to go has always helped me to save a lot more and a lot faster and not feel such a pull to buy things I don't need when I know that there is something exciting that I'm saving for but even if you don't like traveling if there is a goal you could start setting for yourself and creating saving goals for yourself like I always have a goal every month of how much money I'd like to save and I put that in once I get paid then that money just starts accumulating and sometimes it's really awesome to um when you have something that you are thinking about buying and instead of buying it you take that money whether it was $40 or $1,000 and you put that into savings and you see your savings go up you can also put it in a high yield interest fund which which I definitely recommend as opposed to just a savings account but either way putting your money somewhere that you can see it going up is another kind of dopamine hit because you get that kind of excitement that you are doing something that is really going to benefit you in the long run

Channel: Minimal Ease

Views: 12,987

Keywords: financial minimalism, budgeting, minimalism, how to save money, saving money, stop spending money, minimal ease, minimalism financial freedom, debt free, minimalist mom, why i don't spend money, i stopped spending money, i stopped wasting money, i stopped wasting money and it changed my life, wasting money, things i dont waste money on, things I stopped buying, frugal living, how to stop spending money on, how to stop spending money on unnecessary things, overspending money

Id: Yglh-HaC-jw

Length: 13min 44sec (824 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 01 2024