I have spoke at length about my challenge but I have not really said much about my spending habits and what sort of person I am. I work about 20 miles (one way) from home. I don’t stop any morning for a fast food breakfast or a five dollar cup of coffee. I have oatmeal at my desk. I don’t go out for lunch I have frozen dinner or soup and sandwich in our break room. I don’t smoke or drink or buy lottery tickets. I buy very few sodas at convenience stores. I eat out less that twice per week. All in all I am not exactly a spend thrift but I am not all pleased with my relationship with money. I keep a simple word document with a table that contains what bill I must pay and when. A few days before pay day I start making a list of things I must pick up like pet food and kitty litter and paper products. Then it starts to turn into a list of stuff I want ,a hoodie, pair of track pants, video game, make up. Then I get my heart set on that list of things, I MUST have them and if something comes up and I cannot afford them I feel really bad. I feel like I must be pretty stupid or pathetic to work 40 or more hours a week and not be able to afford anything that I want.  There is something very pathological about this. Because I know that our lives are pervaded by crap that even the poorest among us have a house full of crap that they had accumulated over the years. We have so much crap that we now need to pay personal organizers and clutter busters to tell to just throw the crap away.  So I have started my challenge to help improve my relationship with money

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I have thought of a few things that I will have to buy. My disabled mother lives with me and I have promised her two bags of rye grass seed so I will be picking that up sometime and Matt and are I are going to a costume party (maybe) for Halloween and if that bears out I will buy us each a new costume. A useless expense? Probably but Matt and I do go to a sci fi fantasy convention every year and a good costume can be recycled. My Binder that holds my DVD collection is getting rather full and I will soon run out of room. That is not something I expect to be able to find at a thrift store but I am going to be wracking my brain for creative solutions until I actually run out of space. The other thing I will probably buy is the Vonage Kit to subscribe to their phone service as I do not currently have long distance service and my job is another town.

I want to keep a written record of how many brand new things that we buy so that I can keep track and I am going to try to keep them to a minimum. . I am thinking of this no buy challenge like a game that I am playing to challenge myself and to turn expectations upside down. The expectation is that the more stuff you can go out and buy the better you feel about yourself and your position in life I wans to see how long I can go without buying anything new.

Shopping should not be hobby; for a long time I have been at the point that I buy new stuff so frequently that I never give myself an opportunity to enjoy the stuff I have bought that is why I have games I have never played.

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Anything used or second hand is allowed

Used Games

Used goods

Used books

You can buy food and any item that is for health and safety

for example

Oral hygiene paraphernalia, underwear and light bulbs are among some of the things that am counting as allowable

Notable exceptions

Crochet items

DVD R

Comics\Graphic Novels

Gift for other people

Services like hair cuts

Trips to the movies  

The general idea is go an entire calendar year with purchasing as few brand new goods as possible. Any thing used is allowed. The premise is that by doing so you can save money and reduce your impact on the environment and it will discourage the alarming consumerism mindset that pervades our society by forcing us to think before buying.

Another benefit of this experiment is to eliminate the notion that personal worth is determined by amount of expendable income you have otherwise stated that the more stuff you can buy the happier you are\should be and that the more obliviously expensive stuff that own the greater you status in society.

As to the exception list the DVD’s are necessary to my DVD collection , the crochet items are needed for that pursuit, Matt and I just started collecting comics and this is important to us and I just can’t give people used stuff it would bother me

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