5 ways to save money through mindful spending

Mindful spending could be the answer to all of your fears! Because how we behave is everything: it has the greatest impact. How we feel about ourselves affects how we think, how we feel, and how we handle money.

When you believe something you do things that reaffirm this belief. So if that belief you are honouring doesn’t serve you or is actually not even true, it forces a behaviour that may be holding you back – holding back your confidence, your knowledge, your self worth.

So here are my 5 tips to save money through mindful spending

What is mindful spending?

Mindful spending is feeling good about what you are spending money on.

It is about knowing what brings you joy, happiness and worth.

1.Be mindful

Bring awareness to your spending. The easiest way to be mindful about your spending is to look at your spending habits. Looking at what you’re actually spending money on tells you so much about what you value.

If you are spending £100 per month on books, for example, and these books add value to your life – don’t beat yourself up!

I had a conversation this week with one of my Inner Circlers; she told me that she’d worked out over the year she had spent a lot on courses and memberships and wasn’t going to spend any more. When I questioned how much value these courses and memberships had brought to her business, however, shed gained so much from them!

Instead of looking at the value she had gained, she was making an emotional decision based on fear and shame at having spent money. And when we dug even deeper, we established that this fear was rooted in messages she’d heard as a child.

Notice how I have suggested mindful spending of your own account?

Not the joint account, or the household account – these are often the easy ones to tackle!

Be mindful of your own spending – your personal accounts and credit cards are often where the spending occurs, rather than the joint or household accounts.

Take some responsibility of your own spending.

2. Stop comparing yourself to anyone else

Comparison is the route of all evil.

It shouldn’t matter what anyone else is doing, thinking, or spending. It matters only what you are doing, thinking, and spending your money on.

What brings you joy, happiness, and fulfilment may be very different to someone else. For example, I spend a lot of my money on books, programmes, and mentors. I would far rather spend my money on these things than for example a gym membership, whereas others may think I’m completely nuts!

So think about and focus on what is important to you.

3. Identify Triggers

Bring awareness to the emotion that you feel at the time when you feel triggered to make an impulse purchase.

So if you’re fearful of money, and you can feel yourself pulling back from making decisions, or taking the plunge to invest for example, when is it that you feel this the most? Attempt to identify the trigger in yourself.

It could be that you’re trying to make decisions when you are tired? When you’re hungry? Or when you’re too busy and feeling rushed.

Take a look at your diary and find a time that would work better for you in order to make these decisions. Change your mood. Change the situation. Talk it out with someone.

4. Remove those triggers

Now removing these triggers is great, but couple this with the behaviour changes and that’s when the magic happens. Otherwise it is just a shallow temporary change and the behaviour will return (because the belief hasn’t changed).

Ever noticed that with starting a new diet for example. You have all good intentions and even when you do start, but it rarely sticks.

Impulsive buys are rarely good thing (they give a temporary dopamine hit). And with Black Friday fast approaching, companies will be making their best marketing attempts to target those impulse buy emotions within us! My top tips to avoiding impulse buys are;

Remove card details from websites you tend to buy from.
Unsubscribe from marketing emails sent to tempt you, or funnel them into a separate folder so you have more control over when you look at these emails.
Impose a browsing ban! If you know that you tend to spend after work when you’re relaxing and browsing on your phone, then ban yourself from browsing during those trigger times.

5. Release the shame and forgiveness around money

Acknowledge that sometimes our emotions serve to protect us as well as sabotage us.

If you have made a bad decision in the past forgive yourself. Let the emotions go.

When we don’t feel worthy we develop patterns that prevent us from having the money we want, and when we feel we aren’t good enough we also fear we will never have enough.

So do yourself a favour and give yourself permission to stop self sabotaging

These 5 tips will all help you to be more mindful of your beliefs and your habits, and will help you to identify ways to save money through mindful spending.

I would love to know which one you want to focus on for the rest of the year. Drop me an email here and let me know!