My three month spending ban challenge, tips on how to buy less and a life update

My attempt at not buying clothes for three months

Shop my outfit – https://www.shopstyle.co.uk/shop/alicexmk/43256829

Hey everyone! It’s been a while… sorry I haven’t put a blog post out for a while but I’ve been finishing all my stuff for uni.
I’m completely done now though which is so exciting. I want to start giving my blog more attention because I feel like it
always ends up being neglected and taking the back seat whenever I have other things going which makes me sad
because I love blogging and I really want to create amazing content to share but I’ve been feeling a bit restricted with
what I can do due to uni. I want to start getting more creative and really putting 100% into this. I go to Ibiza in just over
a week so I’ll be creating loads of content whilst I’m there. Anyways let’s get into this week topic.

So, back in January, I decided to set myself a little challenge, I’d been doing some research into sustainable fashion
and had also become aware of my tendency to impulsively buy things and never actually wear them. So, I decided for
the first three months of 2019 I wasn’t going to spend any money on clothes. Now I’m going to lie I only lasted two months
instead of three and I did make a cheeky valentines purchase and bought myself a new dress as a gift BUT other than that
one dress I didn’t buy any clothes for two months which I’m actually quite proud of! I think what broke my spending ban was
once March came around the seasons started changing and I just felt like I needed to add some new pieces to my wardrobe
and give it a bit of refresh. I did find however I was much more intentional with what I bought and I bought a lot less than I
normally would have.

I think my spending ban was a fun little challenge and even though I kind of failed it a bit I’m glad that I

did it and would definitely recommend it since it has helped to change my outlook on shopping. There

were five things that helped me curb my spending which were:

1. Removing shopping sites from my social media, especially Instagram! – Following your favourite shopping websites on social media is just going to create temptation and the

Instagram shopping feature just makes it too risky. I now have all shopping websites on mute so I can’t

be tempted to go on them for a quick browse.

2. Unsubscribing from sales related newsletters and texts – Having the latest pieces and discounts popping into your inbox isn’t going help with your ban so make

sure you detox your inbox and unsubscribe from all clothing website mailing lists before starting this

challenge.

3. Deleting all shopping apps from my phone – if they’re out of site they’ll be out of mind. Shopping apps make it all too easy to shop plus all the

notifications coming through about sales and what’s new in doesn’t help either.

4. Ban yourself from watching hauls – I know this means cutting down on your favourite YouTubers videos but the majority of the time haul

videos lead to shopping sprees, so just don’t go there!

5. Saving it for later – if you do end up coming across something you like instead of clicking ‘add to

basket’ save it to a Pinterest board or to a website such as Shoptagr (which you can read more about here). This way you’ve got them saved and you can come back to them later on, after you’ve thought

about them a bit more, to decide whether it’s something you actually need. I’ve created a Pinterest

board which I have creatively called ‘Wishlist’ which I have been using to pin ideas on and now looking

at some of the things that I pinned at the start of the year and comparing them to now, even though it’s

only been a few months, I look at them and I’m so glad I didn’t actually buy them.

Challenging myself to a spending ban was inspired by the things I started reading about sustainable fashion which I did a whole post on here. I also did a post about how to care for your clothes to make the last longer which you can read here and I wrote one about making the most of the clothes already in your wardrobe and how to get more creative with your outfits which has more useful tips that would help this challenge (click here to read that).

I hope you’ve enjoyed this post! Let me know if you’ve ever done something like this before below or if you would take the challenge. I’d also love to know how long you think you’d be able to go without buying any new clothes (I thought I’d only last a month).