Addicted to shopping

I realised that the more I try to control my spending, the more shopping I do.

Recently, due to many expenditure, I found myself 8k behind my planned savings.

As a result, I was trying very hard by trying to spend below my means. But instead, I found myself more stressed up and then doing online shopping i.e. ended up spending more.

As I look around, I found that most of my female colleagues are kind of addicted to shopping. Some are always shopping for clothes, shoes, others are shopping for kid stuff etc.

This is definitely an obstacle.

Budgetting

Budgeting is the first step to creating a financial plan. Because only through this, you can know how much you could save every month.

Without savings, one cannot invest.

There are many budgeting apps nowadays that one can use to track your expenditure.

For me, I tried using apps for a month or two before I will give up because of the hassles. I am a macro person so instead I resorted to using excel to do a budget. This is less hassle as I just need to review it once a year if there are changes to my income.

After coming up with this, I will get the expected savings amount. So again, I just mark my calendar to check the amount in my acc at end of every 3 months if i has the expected amount.

E.g. my saving is X amount now and I can save Y amount every month (note: i used a separate acc from my main account for savings so i will set up auto transfers).

At end of 3 months, I should have X + 3Y in my savings account.

This is not a guaranteed method one can use to save because there will be times when I cant save the y amount due to paying for income tax, holidays etc.

So what i do is that I will try to make up for this in coming months by either saving more than Y. Or when there's bonuses. This involves abit of balancing.