Watching the Wants

Things we want are way too convenient and available in this day and age. The mentality of my generation and credit card use has engineered a group that quickly buys new hair products, makeup, clothing, and many many accessories. I once saw a blip on the news about the amount of coffee a Generation X female bought in a week. She bought two in the morning, one with her daily $7.00 lunch. The total spent every week was approximately $90 a week, and this didn't include the weekend!

I am not always the money savvy chick I'd like to be, I'll admit. It's all too easy for me to be at Target and easily spend fifty dollars, go home, and wonder what I bought. Often it's new lotions, new underwear, new cleaning products, new hair gel. But when I get home, I have nearly full bottles on the shelf already! When's the last time you actually had one bottle of hair gel, squeezed out the last bit, and didn't have another bottle waiting? Even the Depression girl, my grandmother, has multiple giant sizes of mouthwash. How much will she ever use?

I can proudly say I think I've become a little better over the years. For example, all the way to work this morning I wanted a low-fat turkey bacon at Starbucks. Instead of meditatively thinking about joys in my life or the tasks I needed to do today at work, I went back and forth about eight times on whether I should get a Cafe Mocha and my sandwich. In the last ten seconds before taking the left to work told myself to go have cereal from my stash at work. I was proud of myself.

Also, at the beginning of the summer I bought a trial kit of spf face lotions for $20. I thought it was a great deal. It came with fifteen small size lotions, and I've found they lasted about three weeks each. I'm still using the remaining few, and have saved myself from buying a $45 bottle I didn't really care for since it's given me the chance to try brands I've always wanted to.

I haven't been able to master this with shoes, but I've been pretty good this summer. It's unbelievable how quickly we spend our hard earned money. The credit world has created some ugly spending monsters. I've noticed if I carry cash, I spend it much more frugally than even using instant cash from a debit card. It's small progress, but I'm really trying to work on watching the wants.