March’s Money Challenge: Kick Your Spending Weakness

We’re helping readers save money all year long with the Lifehacker Ultimate Money Challenge. This month, we’re bringing back one of last year’s favourites: kick your spending weakness.

Photo: Terje Sollie

We all have problem spending areas, and while we don’t want to keep you from spending money on things you enjoy, we do want to help you spend more mindfully. This means cutting back on things you buy impulsively then later regret. Your spending weakness might be restaurants. Or it could be gadgets. Or it might just be random daily deals. If you’re not sure what your weakness is, take a moment to look at your budget and analyse your spending. Maybe your finances are already optimised, but if you’re like most people, you have a few areas you can work on.

[referenced url=”https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2015/03/how-to-program-your-mind-to-stop-buying-crap-you-dont-need/” thumb=”https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/t_ku-large/n1s6c2m6kc07iqdyllj6.jpg” title=”How To Program Your Mind To Stop Buying Crap You Don’t Need” excerpt=”We all buy things from time to time that we don’t really need. It’s OK to appeal to your wants every once in a while, as long as you’re in control. If you struggle with clutter, impulse buys and buyer’s remorse, here’s how to put your mind in the right place before you even set foot in a store.”]

For this month’s challenge, we want you to tell us your problem spending area and how you’ll try to tackle it. We have a few ideas and tools to help you get started:

• Control Impulse Spending By Asking How a Purchase Improves Your Life
• Think of Impulsive Shopping as the Enemy of Your Financial Goals
• Amazon Contemplate Forces You to Think Twice About Your Amazon Purchases
• Get Out of Debt by Switching to a Cash-Only Policy
• The ‘3D’ method: Determine, distract, delay
• Delete your saved payment info online

Ideally, you’ll kick the habit and make it a permanent thing. Of course, you want to actually save the money you save, too — there’s little point in cutting back on impulsive spending in one area just to blow it in another. You in? Sound off below!