How's My Spending?

It's been three months since I started making the effort to be more mindful about my discretionary spending, so it seems like a good time to take a look at how my habits have changed, and how much. I'm giving myself a financial report card, so to speak.

While I do not consider myself a compulsive shopper, I had gotten into a mindset of buying things more or less at will, without much regard to how much I was spending. I wasn't buying expensive things, but I was buying a lot of less expensive things. On average I was spending about as much in a given month as I was comfortably able to pay on my credit card each month, which would have been fine if I wasn't carrying a balance in the thousands of dollars, from my braces and other things.

I have forced myself to curtail my impulses and make choices. If I do decide to buy something, I have to make up for it by resisting the urge to buy something else. One thing in my favor is that warm-weather clothing is less interesting to me, so I tend to buy less clothing at this time of year. I have made some clothing purchases, which I've talked about in my weekly posts, but mainly just inexpensive items like polo shirts.

The big thing for me has been avoiding temptation by cutting back on the amount of time I spend looking for stuff on eBay. The less time I spend looking, the less I find to be tempted by. I've bought two watches in the past three months. but I also resisted buying at least two others. I have stayed away from other eBay temptations like shoes and outerwear, because those are the categories where I tend to make iffy purchases that, for one reason or another, I end up not wanting to keep.

As a result of this, I still have a fair amount of stuff that I would like to sell. I'm off for the next four days, so I should try to make some time to take pictures of the items I want to list. And as is frequently the case during long weekends, posting activity may be lighter than normal.