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Hey, y'all.
My name is Hannah Louise Poston.
And welcome back to another episode
of The Beautiful Budget.
This is my TFD takeover.
I am a writer and an online content creator.
I have my own YouTube channel, too.
And we'll link that down below.
This month, I'm taking over TFD and presenting to you
a series of four videos.
Today I am going to tell you the story of how I changed my life
by changing my consumer habits.
I used to be an overspender, especially
on clothes and beauty products.
I had piles of half-used cleansers
and shampoos filling my bathroom cabinets,
drawers full of makeup that I had bought just to try
and didn't really wear, and a constant stream
of clothing coming into my wardrobe that
resulted in huge closet purges two or three times a year.
I also, as you can imagine, spent more than I could afford
and struggled on and off with credit card debt
and with deep-seated feelings of shame and anxiety
about my spending.
For someone who genuinely loves beautiful things--
which, to be clear, I don't think is a bad quality--
figuring out how to position one's self
and define one's consumerism in this modern world
of unprecedentedly large-scale manufacturing and scarily
intelligent advertising is not straightforward.
I am definitely still a work in progress.
But when I look back at my past behaviors, how I used to shop,
how I used to live, sometimes I'm
shocked at the differences between my past
and my present habits.
So I'm going to take you on a brief tour through the steps
that I took to make this massive change in my life.
Step one, facing the problem--
back in 2017, as it was getting towards the end of the year,
I finally admitted to myself that I had a problem,
that it wasn't going away, and that no one else was
going to solve it for me.
The half measures that I had attempted to make up
until then weren't enough.
I tried to budget time and time again.
I would tell myself, I'm only going
to spend x amount of money on clothes this month or makeup.
And I could never stick to it.
For me, a big part of this was acknowledging
that a behavior doesn't have to be classified technically
as an addiction in order for it to be bad enough
to basically ruin your life.
If you Google "shopping addiction," which I did,
you will find yourself reading about this long list
of behaviors which were behaviors
that I didn't exhibit.
But I was still on track to severely hamstring
my own future, both financially and psychologically.
And I had to tell that to myself.
Nobody sat me down and told it to me and nobody would have.
Step two, making a plan--
so the plan that I made at the end of 2017
was to quit buying my vices--
makeup, skin care, clothing, and homewares-- for an entire year.
I chose a no-buy year because the drama and scale of it
felt exciting to me.
It felt like an exciting challenge.
And that was encouraging.
And at that time, I would say I needed all the encouragement
I could get.
I had had success with cold-turkey projects
in the past, like quitting sugar.
So I knew that I was capable of quitting something cold turkey.
And I really believed that I could do it.
That last one I think is really important,
I embarked on my no-buy year totally intending
to keep my promise to myself and see it through.
To me, there was no question of whether or not
I would stick to my rules.
The questions were about how it would feel
and how it would change me.
I didn't know whether or not it would work, how it would work.
But I knew that I had to stick to my rules
and keep my promise to myself to find out.
So that's what I did.
Step three, self-inquiry-- one of the reasons
that I decided to do a no-buy year in 2018
was that I hoped that it would open
some doors to self-inquiry.
I mean, to be frank, I was also desperate.
It was kind of like a last resort.
I knew I had to do something.
And I knew it had to be dramatic.
But I went into the year not unaware
that there might be more to it than just taking a year off
of shopping and saving a year's worth of money.
And boy, did it ever open the door to self-inquiry.
My habits going into the no-buy year
were so entrenched that it rocked my inner world to pull
the plug on those behaviors.
And what I did was that I paid very, very close attention
to how I was feeling as I was going through it.
I was constantly asking myself, what am I feeling?
Why am I feeling this way?
What is this about?
What exactly is this feeling?
And what is underneath this feeling?
In this way, I learned so much about myself
during my no-buy year.
From day one, I just felt like I was pulling up information
about myself from the underbelly of my life,
pulling it out up into the light of day
and looking at it pretty much for the first time.
Quitting shopping gave me the space and the energy
to do that.
And I also think it gave me the permission
to do that, the grace to do that.
Step four, falling apart, becoming an absolute mess-- so
some of the stuff that came up from the underbelly of my life
was awful.
It turned out, surprise surprise,
that there was a reason that I had been so desperate
to distract myself from that stuff by spending every dollar
I ever earned shopping.
It was awful.
Underneath it all, I had these feelings,
like I was afraid my life was going horribly wrong, ashamed
that I hadn't done anything about that.
And underneath that it turned out that I didn't fundamentally
love myself.
I was unkind to myself.
I was at war with myself.
When it all came out, which took time--
it wasn't like the second week of my no-buy year
and all of a sudden, everything was out in the light of day--
it was like the eighth month.
It was September by the time it was really all coming out.
And when that happened and I didn't
have my familiar crutch of shopping to distract me,
things got worse, as they say, before they got better.
My mental health and my relationship
were strained, especially in the second half of the year.
And if you're considering doing a no-buy year,
I realized that I might not be making it sound very appealing.
It was hard.
But it was so worth it.
I think that to fundamentally change one's life,
one often has to go through a period like this, a kind
of dark night of the soul.
And it was the no-buy year that precipitated that.
And there is good news, because step five was putting myself
back together.
At the end of the year, at the end of 2018,
I had changed in a lot of ways.
And one of those ways was just chemical.
It had to do with patterns in the brain.
So the cycle of feeling bad, escaping into shopping,
wanting stuff, buying stuff, getting stuff, then going back
to feeling bad, escaping into shopping,
wanting stuff, buying stuff, that cycle
had been on pause for so many months, 12 whole months,
that it was like my brain had gotten a chance
to heal over that pattern.
Now, with this reset of my brain chemicals
at the beginning of 2018, I was able to budget
successfully for the first time in my life.
So I made a budget for my vices--
again, makeup, skincare, clothing,
homewares, the beautiful things that I
love to love and love to buy.
I made a budget for them, spent the budget every month
with pleasure.
And I found myself again for the first time
in my life buying some of the things
that I wanted to buy without shame.
The other changes were, I would say, much messier.
So I had opened doors of self-inquiry
during my no-buy year, which led to more doors, which
led to more doors.
And even though the year was over
and I was budgeting and shopping again,
I had to keep going through those doors.
I had to keep going down that part of the path.
So I found myself at the beginning
of 2019 engaged in this lifelong work of thoughtfulness,
discovery, evolution, and action that I now believe
is necessary for fulfillment.
This includes reading, writing, getting
to know myself even better in all of these ways,
doing some therapy, familiarizing myself
with resonant thinkers and philosophers,
and finding a mentor to guide me through some delicate inner
work, work on that stuff, that stuff that had come up,
so that I can more skillfully and lovingly
navigate my own impulses.
Before my no-buy year, I think that shopping
had been taking up the space in my life that that work should
have been occupying.
And furthermore, because I wasn't doing that work
and because I felt unfulfilled because I wasn't doing
that work and because my underlying sense of shame
and unkindness to myself was going unaddressed,
I was a sitting duck for the advertising industry, right?
I was particularly ripe for the machinations
of contemporary advertising.
It's easy to sell someone an endless stream of stuff when
she feels fundamentally broken and unfulfilled.
So when I put myself back together after the no-buy,
it was like those two things switched places.
My fulfilling work, both my inner work
and my creative career, finally took center stage.
And shopping became this fun side
show that I visit sometimes but that I
know that I have to keep an eye on,
which brings me to step six, navigating the new normal.
So it's over three years since my no-buy year ended.
And each one of those years has changed me, too.
I haven't just turned from one kind of person
into another like flipping a switch.
But because I admitted I had a problem,
stopped shopping for an entire year,
engaged in self-inquiry, let myself fall apart somewhat,
and then thoughtfully rebuilt and restructured my habits,
the five steps that we've talked about,
these days I find that all of these things are true.
I almost never impulse buy anything.
I usually consider a purchase for weeks, if not months,
before making it.
I find it much easier to resist the allure of things
like fast fashion and short-lived trends.
I'm rarely tempted to spend beyond my means
or outside my budget in a given month.
It just doesn't seem worth it.
Because I know I'm not overspending,
I'm more likely to allow myself to buy the one thing I really
want, even if it's a bit expensive, within reason
for me, of course.
I feel much happier choosing nicer things.
And I also feel freer and calmer because fewer things
are entering my life.
And those two principles support each other.
Most importantly, I know that feelings of emptiness,
lostness, anxiety, and shame cannot be healed by shopping.
So if I ever find myself slipping
into trying to shop my way out of unhappiness,
I catch myself in the act and I put the brakes on and address
those feelings in other ways.
As a result, I own fewer things.
But I like my stuff better than I did before.
I'm not some sort of financial genius.
And sometimes I make mistakes and buy the wrong thing
or something that I don't end up using or loving
as much as I thought I would.
But it's not a big deal, because it
happens against a backdrop of an overall much more
comfortable relationship with desire, stuff, and money.
All of this adds up to, I guess what you could
call my personal minimalism.
It's a flexible, evolving philosophy
that prioritizes thoughtfulness and leaves
plenty of room for imperfection, plenty of room for me
to just be a living, breathing, imperfect human who's
always learning.
So that's how I went from being a rampant overspender who
was basically afraid to look at her own bank account
to being a thoughtful consumer who is very in touch
with her finances and makes relatively healthy shopping
decisions most of the time.
I hope you enjoyed this video.
If you did, I hope that you'll check out the other videos
that I'm filming for this series, The Beautiful Budget,
here on TFD.
Bye.