Embrace Conscious Spending: Discover Your Spending Cycles and Rewrite Your Financial Habits with Love

You have them you know? Those Spending Cycles!!

The trouble is that most of the time when we are not focused on our money they rumble along at the unconscious level.

• That daily coffee - and maybe cake cos you deserve a reward because you are doing so much.

• That last-minute pop into the shop on the way home to pick up one loaf of bread that ends up being another £20.00 lost goodness knows where.

• That “just a few pounds” Amazon purchase - runs to four figures by the end of the year.

And no, I am not saying you shouldn’t have those things - just that we should be more conscious of every time we are spending and stop being on autopilot when it comes to our money.

Identifying Your Spending Cycles

We each have our unique spending habits and cycles - and we should! We are adults who get to choose when and how we spend our money.

That's the important statement: “We get to choose”

YOU get to choose. You get to choose how much money your make, how much money you spend, and how much money you save .. YOU, only you!

Setting Conscious Spending Goals

We may be a while off being able to earn more and we may have a way to go before we can save more but the thing we can control right here and now is the spending cycles of when we spend.

If your spending is entirely reactive at the moment then that “most expensive loaf of bread in the world” scenario may be the spending cycle that you live in.

Knowing that you could choose to stash an emergency loaf in your freezer and circumvent that expensive unplanned shopping trip.

Creating Your Spending Rules

You could decide to begin by not spending money on just one day of the week - make it Sunday if that is easiest. Free yourself up for one day when you are not an automatic spender.

You could decide to only spend in the week and not spend at all at the weekends. I guarantee you wil get better at forward planning your weekends if you do this!

You could decide to not carry your wallet with you Monday through Fridays and only spend on the weekends, planning all your tasks that involve Money into just two conscious days.

OR

And I don’t suggest you do this right away - but you can go full ninja and make all of your spending happen on just one day of the week and “make do, mend and muddle through” for the rest of the time. I guarantee your wallet will thank you for this!

The thing is - YOU get to set the rules!

Right now you are not even conscious of the rules that you have set yourself - and if you don’t know the rules of the game it's pretty hard to figure out how to win!

So here is a gentle challenge for you:

• Put your wallet somewhere you wouldn't normally have it.

• Instead of having your cards in your pocket - zip them up inside your bag!

• Instead of having your wallet in your bag - move it to your home desk drawer.

Do whatever works for you so that when you go to buy something the access to money is somewhere different so that you notice the spending action again.

And write it down …

Get yourself a FIRE notebook that you can refer back to to see how far you can journey.

When you notice WHEN you are spending money you can choose to do something more intentional in the future - and do you have an idea of the Spending Cycle you would like to live by?

Me? Going hardcore my friends!

Got a chunk to clear and a bigger stash of cash to accumulate so I am going to restrict my “Spending” to Saturday mornings only for as long as I can bear it in 2024 … wish me luck!

Loving Your Financial Journey

Now - please don’t hear what I am not saying!

This is not about beating yourself and being all “crash diet-like” on your spending then falling off the wagon and spending it all!! (You know what I mean - I know you do!)

This is about loving yourself - loving your future self - loving your future retired self enough that you are willing to get intentional about your spending now so that you can save for that fabulous future then! And face it - that future is getting closer by the day!

No blame - no shame - right? Just a gentle exposure of our habits and tweaking them to serve us better!

This is YOUR journey - you get to take the steps as and when you need to.

Me- I know I need to move fast .. you can dance to your rhythm!

Once you start looking at those unconscious spending habits and making them conscious .. well we are going to meander down a whole rabbit hole of finding out how and why we have the money habits that we do and how we can create those that serve our future selves better!

I have faith you can do this - and it starts by deciding today to be aware of every time we spend our hard-won money.

I love that you are on this journey with me - I love that you love that future version of yourself enough that you are deciding to take care of her by planning now.

You're so much closer than you think.

I love you

Elaine XX