Life By Kristen

No Spend June

I’ve done a no-spend challenge before and was successful. I’m giving it a shot again this June.

When I did my first no- spend challenge in February of 2013, it was a way to finally get rid of credit card debt and eliminate a lot of my random shopping habits that had become one of my ways to fight boredom. I repeated in July of that year to try to get on top of frivolous spending. This time around, I have two objectives- one to save some dough to start putting towards my student loan pay down, and two, to stop shopping for clothes.

I have a love/hate relationship with my closet which is also directly related with how I feel about my body on any given day (but that’s for another day!). There are work clothes for everyday, work clothes for when I’m feeling blah and not great about how I look, and work clothes for important days/work cocktail parties/special events. I have weekend clothes for hanging around, for doing house or yardwork, and for going out to run errands or out to dinner. There are clothes that I’d never leave the house in and only wear for cooking, and so on. That’s not even saying anything about the fact that I live in a four-season climate that can have radically different temperatures from day to day, so often times the light wool sweaters are vying for the same space as the summer sundresses.

The result of this is I buy a lot of clothes. In the past, I’ve gone a couple of months in a row without buying clothes for myself, but then the seasons change and I realize I have no tank tops or sweaters, or some other category of clothing that I think I need. Newsflash: I almost never need anything. With the exception of maybe when I graduate from college and realized I had no professional work clothes, I’ve never been without something appropriate to wear.

In the past few years, the manner of my clothes shopping has changed dramatically, in that I mostly shop online now. I like having the ease of finding my size and the color I want without much effort, with the only use of my energy often coming if/when I return something that doesn’t fit. It’s a really bad habit and if you ask Q what one of his pet peeves is about me, it’d be this (mindless online shopping and always returning). In my mind, I don’t spend a lot of time shopping because I almost never go into an actual store to try on clothes or buy something frivolous.

But that’s not true because I changed where/how I shop! I’ve taken to a lot online consignment and secondhand options. ThredUp is the best and worst discovery I’ve made on the internet.  It gives me all the satisfaction of “the hunt” without having to spend hours in a secondhand store trying to find things I need. eBay is the same thing, especially since I can find the most random things on there like funky and different vintage brooches for under $5.

So this June, there will be no clothes shopping or late-night eBay brooch hunting. I won’t fill the time when Q is watching a bad sci-fi movie with hunting down dresses on consignment sites. I don’t need a single thing in my closet and in fact, I should spend more time concentrating on what I actually do wear and like, instead of having all these different ‘categories’ of clothes that are only for certain things– my life isn’t that busy, exciting, or diverse to have more than 1 special occasion dress!

The only allowed purchases in June are for the house projects on the list, approved health/beauty products (shampoo, conditioner, body wash, etc.), and groceries/house supplies like paper towels, TP, etc. I will resist the lure of the $5 sale t-shirts at Target and have already unsubscribed from all my favorite retailer emails. I’m hoping to pop an extra hundred dollars this month towards my student loan payment, with the aim on making this more of the norm for my monthly budget going forward!