Confessions of a Shop/Polish-a-holic

Ok, so that should be my blog name, but ah well!  I'm sure it's taken anyways ;)

Have any of you read the book, or watched the movie The Confessions of a Shop-A-Holic?  I finished the book about .. 2 weeks ago I guess it was, and wanna talk about funny and way to easy to relate to, my name could totally be Becky (the main character in the book who has a shopping addiction and is continued search for ways to stop spending)!  I found the book in our basement when my sister, my mom and I decided to do an overhaul and get it cleaned up (should have taken before and after pictures, you would be AMAZED!), so I stashed it in my closet to read.  I have a Kobo eReader that I read all my books on now, but I will still pick up a book-book from time to time :)  I love reading, it's one of my favourite past times, other than polishing.  I have over 160 books in my collection (about $1800 value!), and that's just what I have in print, not digital.  I treasure my books, I'm proud of them, but they got "banished" to the basement in order to make room for my polish :D

Anywho, the reason for this blog post is because I have been thinking about how much polish-related purchases I have made in the last couple weeks, and months, and it just about makes my head spin!  One of my best-polish friends Amber posted about Envelope Budgeting just yesterday and after reading the post, I decided I would take the plunge and try to get on track with all my impulse buying and spending, good practise for my New Year's Resolution No Buy!  Here is her blog post about it.

So basically, you make envelopes (click here for a template - borrowed from One Good Thing by Jillee) for all of your expenses and find out how much you need/can afford for each envelope.  My expenses will be food (groceries and take-out), polish (a must!), car/gas, clothing, and miscellaneous bills.  I currently still live at home so the only bills I have are my cell phone and car insurance/gas.  I figure this will also be good practise for when Tyler and I buy a house in the (hopefully) near future :)

I am already squirrelling away money into another savings account, "paying myself rent" as my financial advisor puts it, so I'm not really over-spending, but I would like to get better control of it.  When I was finished paying off my car I was excited because I had more money,  but that quickly made for a bad situation with extra unnecessary spending.  So I began paying myself rent to help curb the spending.  Then I found polish, lol!

So here goes!  Open up the template linked above and using whatever paper you want (plain, coloured or something with a fun pattern) and print off the number of envelopes you need to correspond with your expenses.  On these, you can list your expense and the amount for it that you have put into the envelope.  You could do this weekly, or monthly, whichever is easier for you to manage.  You may even find that you do some envelopes by month and some by week.  For me, I should have a polish amount for the year :P  Just do what you know you can manage with your income.

Cut the envelopes out on the solid lines, fold on the dotted lines (doesn't this remind you of making geometric shapes in elementary/grade school??).  Use either tape or glue to secure the side and bottom tabs, leaving the top open so you can stick your cash in there :)

Make a list of your income and your expenses and decide how much you want to save from each payday in savings (I'm not a financial advisor, this is just how I'm doing it).  Then divvy up your cash for each category and put it into each envelope, then spend accordingly.

Some of you may have direct deposit for your paycheques.  With this, you can make the withdrawl for the cash you need for your time frame and put it into your envelopes.  That way you don't have to use "plastic" for your purchases.  But what about those bills that are on automatic withdrawl?  You should know when your payments come out (I know that my cell phone bill is due the 11th of each month) so put that cash back into the account that you use to pay the bill.  For me, my cell phone bill comes off of my Visa card, so for me I would deposit the cash back onto my Visa (or into my bank account and transfer).

Now, some of you may be thinking "but that sounds like a lot of work, taking money out then putting it back in, etc." or "I only have x amount of transactions a month".  Yes it may be a lot of work but if it helps with the spending, I'm all for it!  And I have an unlimited number of transactions for my savings account, so for me, this works :)

For my savings that I squirrel away, I have those already set up to automatically withdraw out of my account, so I will leave those as is, but everything else is going to be strictly cash-only from now on! :D  I hope I will get support from all you wonderful ladies with this project/endeavour!  It's going to be hard with all these polish sales going on but I really need and want to stay on track!

So what about you?  Do you have out-of-control polish spending habits?  What is your weakness?