6 weeks in and still (mostly) on the wagon

So my quest to buy nothing for 12 months continues, and while I'm not going to claim total success I have made some significant changes to my spending habits. It's helped me to identify where my real weaknesses are and what I need to do differently if I'd like to continue to buy less in the future. It's really highlighting to me how shopping has become my principle pass time. From what I do on holiday, to my spare time, to my main bonding activity with my mother. It literally occupies the majority of my time when I'm not at work, and that's kinda scary.

So I have made a handful of purchases, I wish I'd made less but I'm also not going to beat myself up about this. Buying some things, be they presents, gifts or consumables, is something I will always have to do, and inevitably this leads me to buying the odd thing for myself. I'm going to continue trying to buy nothing for myself, but I know this will be impossible. So far I've bought;

1. Some books. All bar one of these relate to my school work or were for use in school, so I don't think I have to feel too bad about this. The other one was for my book group. I'll need to keep buying a book a month (assuming it's one I don't currently own) for this. On the plus side I rarely keep the book after reading it, so I won't be filling the house with more crap.

2. A cardigan. It was brand new, cheap, and very nice in a charity shop in Oswestry. My mum pretty much makes her living buying things cheaply from charity shops and jumble sales and then selling them on Ebay. Consequently time spent with her often involves trailing around charity shops. When my mum and her partner joined us for a couple of days on our holiday we visited a dozen or so charity shops. Temptation was everywhere and I inevitably caved, but it could have been a lot worse.

3. 2 dresses. One was a drunken purchase from Facebook from a selling group I haven't (yet) unfollowed. It was a space themed dress I've been looking for for months to go with a space themed brooch my husband bought me for a really good price. Of course karma bit instantly with the seller accidentally mistyping her email causing me to send the funds to the wrong Paypal address. It took weeks to resolve, the universe was trying to tell me to behave! The other was an Etsy purchase with the gift card my in-laws got me for my birthday. As I always do with gift cards I dither for weeks trying to decide what to use it on. It was becoming an excuse to endlessly browse Etsy and add stuff to my basket only to reconsider and delete it later. I decided to finally bite the bullet and buy myself a handmade custom dress in Pacman fabric. It should be very fun, and arrive in a month or so.

4. a case for my laptop. I kinda needed one, and I found a nice one reduced to a very cheap price. The bargain justification I find myself using a lot, i.e. "it's fine because it was so cheap"....

These are the only non-consumables I've bought myself since 5/3/2018. There have been other things, I've bought gifts, a ball for Arthur, a cup with a straw so that Arthur can drink smoothies, but these were permissible exceptions. I have been given quite a few things by Chris, mainly because this month has seen our 10 year anniversary and he's just recently found a jewellery brand that I like so he's got a steady stream of gift ideas. This included this fabulous Kraken necklace, which I quite enjoyed planning an outfit around for an afternoon out in Manchester.

Overall we have certainly added more to the house than we've taken away, but the pace has lessened. I find myself now thinking of ways to 'use up' things that we have too much of. I think I need to consider having a big clear out of stuff, but this is where my quest to not buy things holds me back, I'm reluctant to get rid of things while I can't buy anything else, like I need to hold on to it in case of emergencies.

Finally my hope of having more time to do other things is not really coming to fruition. I find I'm still spending a lot of my time absentmindedly browsing online shops. The fact that I'm not going to buy anything does not seem to have gotten rid of this bad habit, and the hours of 7-9 of a weekday evening are still predominantly spent in front of the TV half watching something, half looking at online stores. It really seems to be an addiction, but hopefully one this year will help me quit.