The Inspired Shopper

Downsizing, going frugal, cutting spending – everyone’s doing it these days. It’s part of a huge wave of consumer empowerment that the mainstream media seems incapable of grasping, instead simply complaining that ‘retail spending is down’.

Partly as a response to the GFC, the frugal movement ties in beautifully with another trend – people who, empowered by social media, are trying to reduce their carbon footprint and the amount of goods going to landfill while ceasing to purchase goods that exploit others.

Many of the frugal are reformed overspenders and shopping addicts who took control and are now paying back debt and learning to live richly on a much smaller (and saner) budget.

But I’m not one of those people. It took me ages to figure out that in fact I have the opposite problem. I’m not a reformed overspender. I’m a reformed underspender.

Before I became an underspender I was a spendthrift. For most of my twenties I simply spent everything I earned. But even then I wasn’t extravagant; I didn’t even have a credit card (come to think of it, I’ve never had a credit card, apart from a temporary one for an overseas trip; I now have a debit card). Nor was I particularly into shopping, or good at it. I just never saved anything because I didn’t realise I could.

When I started stingeing, I overdid it. It was a correction that went too far. I couldn’t tell the difference between necessary and unnecessary spending. For example, for about four years I went without a car; yet during that time I wouldn’t spend money on taxis to get home from a party, even though I was saving hundreds of dollars a year in car expenses.

I wrote my book, The Inspired Shopper, as an attempt to work out how to spend money wisely and how to buy the things I really needed.

The book has helped me to do those things, and most of things I buy these days are right for me. I imagine it would also be of use to reformed overspenders who want to spend in moderation.

But it doesn’t entirely take away the anxiety about spending. It just means that most of the time I don’t have to act on it (or fail to act because of it). Fear of spending money runs deep. It’s a basic distrust in the process of life. Giving money away to get something in return requires a degree of trust – that the object is not faulty, that it will work for a reasonable amount of time, that you’re not just throwing money away.

Usually I think I’ve worked through this. And then one bad buy and bang! I’m back to underspending hell again.

The lure of underspending 

The extreme end of the frugal movement is compacting. Compacters commit to buying no new non-perishable goods, apart from necessities such as underwear and health and safety items, for a year. They can buy secondhand goods, barter, and receive gifts. Compacting seems to be less popular now, but the Fashion Challenge has taken over where compacting left off.

In some ways the Fashion Challenge is more extreme than compacting. For a year you commit to not buying any clothes at all, including underwear, socks, material for making things, or secondhand goods. You can swap clothes with others but you can’t receive clothes or undies as gifts. When I’m in underspending mode, the Fashion Challenge actually sounds quite tempting. No difficult decisions to make!

It’s not that I don’t enjoy shopping these days. I love it. I just don’t love spending. They’re not the same thing.

Underspending is actually quite painful. It can lead to compulsive buying because you end up holding out too long for something you really need. You may hurriedly buy something without checking that it has all the features that you require because you’re so desperate to purchase a necessity.

Neuroscientist Gregory Berns has found that when we have money in our bank accounts (or pockets) it means more to us because it offers unlimited possibilities. We don’t have to commit to spending it on one thing. Twenty thousand dollars could fund an indulgent trip to Paris that includes sampling a series of five-star Michelin restaurants, go towards a down payment on an apartment, or pay for one year of a law course.

When you spend that money, it’s gone. Committing to one or more things means that all the other possibilities fall away. If you’ve been saving for a while, it may become difficult to let a large slice of money go.

Frugality doesn’t mean a miserly approach to life. Most people who write about budgeting recommend building small treats into the process. And many frugal people make it their policy to buy quality goods when they do buy. Ethical purchases make even more sense in this context. Of course, for many people frugality isn’t a choice, it’s a necessity.

The habit of saving

Even if you don’t come from a history of underspending (and I understand that in our consumer society most of us don’t), is it possible to become addicted to frugality so that we become afraid to spend? Could too much compacting be bad for you? Or, once you’ve curbed the overspending, is it relatively simple to get the balance right without too much pain?

I would love to hear from readers about this. How do you know when to save and when to spend? How do you treat yourself? Is it possible to get addicted to saving? Is it hard to spend money when you’ve been saving too long? How do you get the balance right?

Until next time!

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like In with the Old and Out with the New - Shopping and the Search for Perfection.
                                                                                                                                                               

When I first started researching my book I began to read about what is often called 'affluenza' -- a kind of frenzied materialism that has a corrosive effect on society. That there were three books (I've read two of them) with this word in the title is indicative of how it has taken off as an idea. But I found with both the books I read I had differences with the authors.

Both books, one by Australian cultural commentator Clive Hamilton and one by English writer Oliver James, bemoan materialism and society's obsession with shopping. This is perfectly understandable. Australians now collectively owe $41 billion on their credit cards. I don't know what the US figure is but I bet it dwarfs that one. The spiritual malaise that such a figure suggests attracts the ire of both authors. Sharon Zukin, a US sociologist, describes this malaise well, suggesting that shopping is what people do to find value -- in the deepest sense -- in today's world. And from an environmental and social perspective, unbridled materialism is disastrous. Think of the greenhouse gases dirty Chinese coal produces providing energy to manufacture all those cheap goods, not to mention the obscene number of Chinese miners who die each year extracting it. There's no doubt that shopping sustainably and going green are both environmentally and socially responsible.

Compacting is one way of countering Western nations' obsession with shopping. Compacters buy no new items apart from those in a few specific categories (eg food, hygiene products, underwear). They buy or borrow secondhand items. I heard lifestyle commentator Maggie Alderson on Melbourne radio recently talking about how useful compacting had been for her in breaking her compulsive shopping habit -- she's no longer a compacter, but is now more disciplined about what she buys. Again, I think this practice is great as a way of breaking long-held consumer habits and forcing people to be more resourceful about how they meet their material needs.

But my problem with this whole anti-materialism thing is that in some instances it may avoid or evade one central fact: that shopping is fun. Of course, there are many qualifications to that statement. I'm talking specifically about leisure shopping, and even that may not be fun if you're strapped for cash, shopping with children, or a compulsive shopper. My point is that we need to address the fun aspects of shopping if we want to change our own shopping habits, let alone other people's.

Both the writers of the books on affluenza I referred to are men. A majority of men don't enjoy leisure shopping and can't see the point of it. When it comes to shopping they tend to get in and get out and engage as little as possible. Although younger men do enjoy leisure shopping, it's women who make up the bulk of those who see shopping as recreation, in Australia anyway. Also -- and this is a huge generalisation -- men often don't have an appreciation of the aesthetics of fashion to the extent that women do. Aesthetic appreciation and the search for novelty are both important reasons why women in particular love to shop.

In my book, then, I'm trying to address those people who have no intention of giving up leisure shopping. I want to show them that they can shop more mindfully, and that they don't have to seek retail therapy blindly. I believe that as people become more conscious shoppers, many of them, budgets permitting, will start to make more considered choices about what they buy and where they buy it from. But I'm not going to deny the delights of shopping. I want to open the field -- to let people know that they have a great deal of choice, in the wider sense, about how they approach and deal with their material needs and desires. My book includes advice about waiting, about practising frugality and budgeting, and about staying away from the shops at certain times; but it's all given in the context of encouraging people to use their intuitive sense -- a sense that goes beyond emotions -- to make shopping decisions.