How to Break the Holiday Shopping Habit
If you’ve spent the past few months on everything from gifts to new clothes and more expensive options for your favorite foods, getting back to your daily spending habits can be harder than you think.
Why? You are probably familiar with the famous quote “We are what we do all the time” (which is often mistakenly attributed to Aristotle; in fact, it was invented by the philosopher Will Durant) – and many of us spend a lot of money during the holiday season.
Repeatedly.
This means that even a basic personal finance step, such as setting a budget for 2020, might not be enough to keep you from overspending. If you’ve developed the holiday habit of buying what you want (often impulsively) to pamper yourself and your loved ones, well … that habit is hard to break.
But here’s how to do it.
Ask yourself what you want your shopping habits to look like
First, you’ll want to give yourself a model to work on. Saying “I want to shop less” or “I want to spend less money” is not enough; Since it is difficult to live in the world without shopping and spending money, you need to create a mental image of the type of customer you would like to become.
Are you going to be the kind of person who makes lists of items to replenish and replace, working long enough in advance so that you have a place to watch sales and discounts?
Are you going to use up everything you’ve already bought, even if you’re a little tired of what’s in your pantry or closet now?
Or are you just going to avoid impulse purchases, avoid anything that doesn’t fit your budget, or set similar boundaries for your spending?
Ask yourself what you would like your shopping habits to look like in 2020 so you know if you are meeting your own goals and standards.
Build a behavior structure that supports your new shopping habits
Once you have a solid understanding of the financial habits that you would like to implement, it is time to ask yourself which behavior is most likely to support those habits. BJ Fogg’s Roy of Fours, from his new book, Tiny Habits, is a good way to understand how you might need to change your daily life to break old habits and reinforce new ones.
For example, if you want to spend less money in restaurants this year, you may need to spend a little more time planning meals and grocery shopping.
If you just want to avoid impulse buying, you may also need to avoid your favorite retailers, which leads me to:
Stay away from temptation (especially online)
If you’ve done a lot of holiday shopping in the past few months, you’ve probably provided various retailers with all sorts of information (your interests, your prices, your email address), which is now being returned to you in the form of highly effective targeted marketing. …
It’s time to unsubscribe from all retailer emails, remove any price tracking alerts you’ve set up (unless you’re tracking what you need and budget for), and not wasting time on your favorite online storefront.
Because that’s how they get you. With time-limited offers, unmissable deals, and dark templates to worry about.
Since the whole purpose of the Internet is to provide commerce (and here we thought it was about the global exchange of ideas), you better not spend time on sites that want you to spend money.
If you’ve also decided to spend less time online in general this year, whether you’re doing a complete digital detox or just trying to stay offline for hours after work, this will be a win-win.
If you do all this work and still make some kind of impulsive New Year, New You purchase, don’t worry. It takes time to break habits, so keep practicing your new spending behaviors – they will eventually start replacing old ones.
Then you can start thinking about what spending habits you would like to adopt when the holidays begin again.