Been doing this for the last 12 years of my life; never realized it had a name.
So, we take the magazine diet of the month approach yet again? Instead of learning healthy spending habits, we barge in with the extremest measures we can find, inevitably fail and try the next needlessly extreme thing, repeating the cycle until we have lost so much self esteem in the process that we tell ourselves that we just aren’t made to save money?
Well then, this website over there told me that they have got shiny new shirts reduced from 1899,- to just 15 bucks, but only if I order 65 of them in the next.two minutes. Take my credit card! I’ll start no spending year right after! Pinky promise!
I see articles like this every couple of weeks and I get the impression that they’re trying to find alternative explanations for trends caused by poverty. It’s hard to develop let alone understand or recognize healthy spending habits when your choices are to pay bills or go hungry.
Yeah. Because to mention it would mean admitting it exists.
Thats the issue. Not only with poverty, but with overspending in general. Usually, money savin measures take time to become noticeable, since there is always some inertia in money flows (things that were already die when the saving measures were started, subscriptions, etc), so people who overspent will immediately see a drastic downfall of their living standards when they start saving, but still overshoot their budget for at least a few weeks usually, until all the overspending is paid off and the savings start to kick in. That’s a really dangerous phase because people often struggle to understand if they are doing it right or not.
I suppose that it’s mostly a psychological thing, and Lord only knows what works well there, but it seems like it’d be a lot less arduous and not that much more effective to just set a low monthly budget for nonessentials than to make it 0.
Probably a healthy think to try like cutting back on drinking or sweets.
Probably won’t make much of a difference environmentally though, and I hope this being a “challenge” doesn’t sprout an industry of pinning issues on people who consider new clothing a luxury.
It’s hardly a pledge. It’s an “I’m just not willing to pay that much for so little, and over the past few years of rising prices, I’ve gotten used to getting by with less”
The big lifehack here is to not just buy less stuff, but to pool time and resources with your friends.
You spend less money if you cook and play together on a regular or semi-regular basis. Restaruants, pubs, movie theaters, sporting events, all ask or require your money to capitalize on your need for socialization. Also, material goods are frequently aimed at the solitary consumer and aren’t really for sharing. Just go around all that nonsense, share/exchange your tools and appliances, host a board-game night, hang out on slack/discord for a few hours, or watch Netflix together.
Edit: if the above seems out of reach, or even the least bit “bad”, I encourage you to dig deep and ask yourself: why? I get that I’m advocating a far less solitary lifestyle. Maybe that can’t be helped, but it might also just be possible that there’s more at work here. For me, I found that I had internalized biases and habits all pointing at a maximal consumption lifestyle. Our economy (here in the US) is built around this behavior, complete with an advertising arm that aggressively teaches it. So, I really am advocating swimming against the current here. But I can also say that the rewards are worth it if you can.
Lemmy is pretty anticapitalist but in my experience asking people to stop supporting the system with their spending tends to upset them. I don’t get it.
Calmer than you, dude.
I hope none of these “only buy what’s necessary” people have kids. Or at least think things like birthday and Christmas presents for those kids are necessary.
I’m also a vegan! Ooga booga!
I’m not sure why you think I’d care, but good for you.
