Hi friends! I know I mentioned in a post last year that I would probably stop sharing personal things on this blog for a while, (which I did do and got a shock recently when I was looking through my posts and realised all I've shared are tattoo posts this year, oops), but I feel like I've found valuable resources this year that I want to share, and if I'm being honest, I enjoy writing these reflection posts and reading past ones, because they show how far I've come, and the things I've worked through year on year, so this is for me, but it's also for you.
I achieved three of my goals this year, and they were so important and wrapped up in each other, that it makes sense to me that they took priority, while other goals fell away slightly, although I will likely still mention those in this blog post. The goals which I did achieve were finally going on our glorious Greek honeymoon, which we did in May of this year, and had the absolute best time, finding my personal style, and the goal which actually allowed me to achieve the other two goals, fixing my financial mindset.
Fixing my financial mindset is something that I've wanted to work on for a long time, and spoiler alert: while I've worked on it and I've made an insane amount of progress with it, I learnt in therapy this year that fixing my relationship with money will probably be an ongoing journey and not something that I can fix overnight, as my formative experiences with money were not great, and while that's not my fault, it is my responsibility to curb my overspending and stop buying an outfit for every single event that I go to, and instead build a wardrobe with things that I absolutely love, and can turn to for a number of occasions. Finding my personal style has, of course, helped with this, as I now have a criteria for the pieces that I buy, and if something I want doesn't meet the very specific standard I have for new clothing, I don't buy it, and this saves me money. I found out about my 'style roots' from Ellie-Jean Royden's Youtube channel, and I could honestly write an entire blog post on my love for her channel and the way that she explains fashion and style theory, but her theory on 'style roots' which is a system that she herself derived, has stopped me from overspending on clothes like nothing else ever has. I highly recommend watching her channel and understanding your style roots if you're like me and you want to a) find your personal style, b) stop buying clothes that you don't actually like a few years down the line, or both. For those curious, my style roots are Flower, Mushroom and Mountain, and I'm obsessed with my clothes now that everything I own fits into my style perfectly.
So on to the financial resources, without which I wouldn't have been able to do any of this. Paige Pritchard and the free introduction to her course, 'Overcoming Overspending', along with her podcast, 'The Money Love Podcast', which I somehow stumbled across on Tiktok (thanks to my 'this you?' for you page), have been incredibly useful in getting me to fix the way that I think about money. Paige teaches listeners about the 'priority of money', (paying off debt, saving for future expenses, and then using any money left over on 'money love', which is where we can buy something that we want to buy just because we want it). I love that her podcast is called the Money Love podcast, as it reminds me that the skill of spending money wisely is not just about being 100% frugal and saving every penny, it's also about spending money on things that we love, just in a way that is thought out and logical. This is going to sound crazy to some of you, but the amount of time that has been saved in my life from not constantly scrolling the 'new in' pages of online shopping websites because I'm bored has been immense, not to mention the time that I used to waste on doing clothing returns as often as I was.
Some of her other teachings which really work for me are the 'things I want to buy' list, which is something I started doing before I discovered Paige, but I stand by it, and the shopping sprint window. I treat my 'things I want to buy' list the same way that I treat my tattoo ideas list, I have to genuinely really love the idea of the item, and it has to stay on my list for a number of months before I buy it, because that means that I really want it. I know that purchases aren't as permanent as tattoos, but thinking of them in this way has helped me because it means that I'm not just buying things to fix my boredom, or sadness anymore - if it passes the test of remaining on the list for months, then I do genuinely want it. That one will sound crazy but if you've ever been an impulse shopper, you'll get it. The shopping sprint window is a window of time where you can spend a budgeted and reasonable amount on a certain category of things you'd like, and then you stop and don't buy anything else in that category for a designated length of time - that one also really works for me as I get a lovely haul of things, I get my little dopamine rush, and then I'm done.
Something that I loved about our honeymoon, aside from the gorgeous weather, and the cats, was that we'd budgeted for it months prior to going away, and we didn't at any point feel that we would run out of money, as everything was planned out ahead of time and we didn't need to spend outside of the budget at all - this made me fall in love with budgeting and tracking my spending, as it means that I'm comfortable in the knowledge of how much I make and how much I spend, and then I can factor in money for fun, once the necessities have been paid, which allows me to put Paige's 'priority of money' lesson into practice.
One of the goals which I did not achieve this year was learning to drive, and something that I'm struggling with at the moment is deciding whether or not to give up on my driving lessons, as I've spent a lot of money on them this year, and truth be told, I'm not enjoying learning, and I'm not getting any better. One side of my brain is engaging in what's called the 'sunken cost fallacy' which is where we essentially think because we've already spent so much time, energy, or money on something, that we may as well keep going with it, so that the money we've already spent is not 'wasted', or spent in vain, but the other side of my brain is perhaps thinking more logically and recognising that if I were to continue, I would surely be spending even more money to potentially still be in the same position this time next year, so it's something I need to think critically about. I'm currently leaning towards spending some time saving up and then switching to automatic driving lessons, (as these are more expensive), so if anyone has experience with switching/driving an automatic, please let me know if you did enjoy driving more afterwards! Brains are so interesting when it comes to this kind of stuff, and I've absolutely loved Paige's podcast for teaching me the science behind why we behave the way we do when it comes to money.
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