Thursday 1 January 2015

Shopping guidelines for 2015

image from here

Happy new year! Wishing everyone the best for this year!

In an ideal world, this is what I am going to do this year. 

I am starting this year with a shopping fast.

I know I must sound like a crazy person given my experience with the fast in the past year. I admit that there is something intriguing about a shopping fast, which is why I keep coming back to it. I won’t recount the details of my shopping fast history here (you can look at the year in review, which gives you an idea of what happened last year); but will say the following:

  • I had done a fast for a month (twice: once in 2013 and the other in 2014) and found the aftermath to be uncontrollable shopping urges. I wonder if this is because the habit of not shopping has not yet been ingrained. 
  • I had done a variation of a shopping fast by getting rid of a number of items instead of a period of time. The result of this is a mixture of success and failure all at once. Success because I did reach the item number (I got ruthless), failure because it happened within a short span amount of time (like a few days), while I envisioned it to last a few months. 

This time, I want the shopping fast to be for a period of 6 months. That’s half a year. This is going to be interesting because I have never done a fast for this long, and is really a test of the first point of observation: will the habit of not shopping be ingrained after more than one month of abstinence. And secondly, will a prolonged period of abstinence result in a better, more streamlined wardrobe.

The only caveat I have at this stage is that the ban would be temporarily lifted if I were to travel. I promise that I will stick to the good quality stuff that has been occupying my lust list for some time. I don’t have any travel plans in the near future, so this should be interesting.

***

Upon reflection, however, the above is (unfortunately) unrealistic for me.

What's more realistic is some form of a shopping guideline, like this:

(1) Thoughtful acquisitions - no impulse shopping, everything must be researched and considered for at least 1 day. This habit is something that I've found to be personally useful when shopping, and tend to minimise acquisition errors. A more deliberate approach to shopping is something that I would like to continue to advocate for this year.

(2) Quality first - leather bags and shoes only, with the exception of sneakers and running shoes. Leather goods are the ones that age well and subsequently, in my books, are the ones that stand the test of time. For jewellery, minimise costume jewellery. This is rather annoying because I enjoy my fair share of costume jewellery, but they are often seasonal and of questionable quality, and therefore do not exactly fit into this criteria of quality first (ugh).

Disclosure: this post is inspired by the following shopping guidelines:

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