Recently a coaching client shared that her spending has been so transformed through coaching that she’s nicknamed her work lunch ‘Matt’!
What an honour!
Jokes aside, in the full story there’s a golden nugget of a technique she’s using to get more life out of her money.
Guilt-free spending
One technique I recommend is to allocate yourself some guilt-free spending each pay. The formal name is an ‘impulses and indulgences‘ account.
As is common when building new habits, my client had some initial resistance to the idea because of course there wasn’t enough to indulge all her impulses.
To her credit she didn’t give up on her goals. Instead she transformed.
Park it
When she is browsing online stores instead of selecting ‘add to cart’ she selects ‘add bookmark’ to a ‘shopping list’ folder.
If after a week the item’s still at the top of her wish list, and there’s available play-dough, she’ll buy it. Most of the time she’s found the desire has passed and has deleted the bookmark.
That’s saved them lots of money and she genuinely enjoys what is actually bought. I refer to this as getting the most buzz for your buck.
Since other items are more important to her, she’s stopped buying lunch and begun making her work lunch, which she hilariously calls ‘Matt’.
(In itself that is a good example of the saving technique called “swapping”.)
You don’t need to nickname anything Matt, but perhaps you could use the idea of a parking space for your impulses, so you too can get the most buzz for your buck.
P.S. Of course, if you do nickname something ‘Matt’ I’d love to hear about it.