Resisting Temptation

The hardest thing about trying not to buy so much stuff has been staying away from eBay. If you hang around here, you know that I think of eBay as my personal flea market/tag sale/consignment shop, and I buy things from there frequently, like, um, watches.

Some stuff is fairly easy to put aside or forget about for a while, but there are certain items, like vintage watches, that I have been searching for literally for years. Back in 2001 I was unemployed for most of the year, so of course a rare vintage model of a watch I was looking for came up for auction, in an even rarer dial color. I had already spent money that I shouldn't have during that time, so I resisted, painful as it was. To this day I have not seen another watch like it anywhere.

But the fact is, I can't trust my own willpower, so the only way to refrain from unnecessary purchases is to not see the items for sale in the first place. I can't stop browsing altogether, but I have cut back on how much time I spend browsing and what I look at. For now it seems to be working.

The other factor I have to contend with is impending gift purchases: during the first two weeks of May I have my sister's birthday, Mother's Day, and the Mrs.' birthday. There is no getting around these expenses, so I need to offset them by not buying stuff for myself. I've already gotten a couple of gifts for the Mrs., which I'm not going to talk about here (even though she isn't the most regular reader here, some of you are in regular contact with her, and no offense to anyone, but I want them to remain surprises).