My New Shopping Rules (AKA a Cure for My Addiction)

If you remember, in my Back from Rehab post I had told you that I had come up with a solution for my Jcrew addiction but then I kind of dropped the subject. The fact is that I wanted to test it over the crazy "Thanksgiving Sale" weekend before talking about it, just in case that it turned out to be a total failure. But the good news is that it passed the test, so I'm going to share it with you and hopefully it will help some of you in the same situation.

First of all, I am not going on a shopping ban. I am one of those persons who have to set realistic goals to have a small chance to get some results. I have never been able to implement a shopping ban for more than a month and that was a very extreme situation in my life. I really admire those who can say "Starting from tomorrow I will stop shopping for a year" but I know myself and I just can't do it. My husband is for the hard way and and always makes promise that I won't shop EVER again under various threatens that span from blocking the access to my favorite sites on the computer (threaten that he has already carried on at the beginning of this year with some success, until I found a way to disable ANY "parental control" password that he could possibly come up with. BTW, if I can do it, your teenager on or daughter can too); cancelling my American Express from the account and giving me pocket money every morning like if I were 10; sending me BACK TO WORK (his words); etc. etc.
What he doesn't understand is that the solution must come from within. It's like someone who is forced to go to rehab, it doesn't work long term.

The second thing that you have to know before you read below is that my shopping addiction is almost 100% an addiction to Jcrew. It happens that I shop elsewhere occasionally, but not addictively and in general I can let go of things or think before buying at other retailers. For more than a year I have been logging into Gilt.com or ideeli.com without ever buying anything and there are often better deals than you can find on Jcrew. But when it comes to Jcrew I loose my control, especially when it comes to sales, promotions and popbacks. So my solution is a cure for my Jcrew addiction and not a general shopping addiction.

I don't know if it's the case for many of you or not but my major issue is that I don't have a budget for my clothing expenses and it is very easy to go overboard when is someone else who is paying the bill. Even if I set myself a budget, write it down, create an Excel sheet and log all my expenses, my credit card doesn't know any of this and cannot stop me from saying "just this one time" when I'm about to make an unbudgeted purchase, which generally leads to many unbudgeted purchases.

Now, I don't know why I didn't think earlier of this (especially when I was trying to find a way to hide my Internet purchases from my husband) but a card that has only a preset amount of money that you can spend exists and it's called a gift card. The Internet shopping experience is pretty new to me (I used to buy everything in store until my daughter was born) and it never came to my mind until very recently that a gift card (which is the same thing that a store credit) could be used for Internet purchases.

So what I did a couple of weeks ago, when I "came back from rehab", is that I returned a bunch of stuff still unworn and/or that I had bought on an impulse and instead of getting the money back I put everything on a Jcrew gift card. Then I deleted my credit card information from the website and voila! My new self-imposed budget magically come true. Easy! I would even go and say genius!

Now I can test the real value of the things that I want to buy against this pre-fixed budget and when I see something go on sale and I'm tempted by it, I ask myself "Are you sure that this is really what you want? Because if you buy this now, you won't be able to buy anything else or (depending on what's the current amount on the gift card) you won't have enough funds to buy that dress that you have been coveting for a very long time". And I can tell you that this changes everything. It's illuminating.

So here are my new shopping rules:

1) I can buy whatever I want if I can pay for it in it's totality with my gift card. If the price exceeds the current amount on the gift card by only one dollar, I have to make choices or wait. Taking "advances" (ie, run out and "recharge" the gift card to be able to make a purchase) is not allowed.
2) If I return something, I can use that amount returned towards another purchase. This makes the whole "one in, one out" strategy a lot more concrete and realistic because I actually have to wait until I have made the return to be able to buy something else, as the gift card amount is not "unlimited", unlike a credit card. I can also "recharge" my gift card with the money that I get back from returning purchases made by cash, also at other retailers.
3) In-store purchases (= extra gift card) are allowed from time to time.
4) I can put a maximum of $25 cash per week on the gift card to "recharge" it (I won't explain why, but $25 is the amount that I'm allowing myself).
5) Making a wishlist helps to stay focused on what I really want. The goal is to make wishlists that last long enough to pass the test of time, ie are real love. I will create a new "Wishlist" section on the right soon, but the Ravine dress (see pic at the beginning of this post) is currently at the top of it.
6) Money gifts and gift cards are welcome.

As you have probably understood, I hope that these rules are steps towards quitting the habit of checking Jcrew.com as soon as I open my eyes in the morning and scooping it for popbacks, clicking on the "Submit Order" button at least once a week, being always tuned on the latest Jcrew offer instead of being tuned on the needs of my family. I can already see the results: during the Thanksgiving promotions I did buy something but I had to limit myself and ultimately I bought one item that I really needed and re-bought a pair of Juliets for a much lower price that I had initially paid (and of course I will put my "gain" on the gift card). I had to let go of all those tempting tees and necklaces for $15.99 and a lot of other stuff (like summer stuff).
Now the amount on my card is close to 0 and guess what? I didn't even check the website for popbacks in the last four days. What for, I don't have money to spend at the moment lol!
This is liberating because I can actually peruse Jcrew.com and read all the Jcrew-related blogs without being constantly on a search for a good deal.

And because I firmly believe in the power of literature and I'm convinced that a good book can keep you away from the mundane (and in fact I don't know how to demonstrate this but I'm sure that I buy a lot less whan I am absorbed in a good reading) this weekend I have finally picked up (and more important, started to read) a book that was on my reading list since it came out but I didn't have time for because I was too busy with my Jcrew obsession. It's "A Gate at the Stairs" by Lorrie Moore, that I highly reccomend (I updated the "What I'm reading now" picture on the side panel. By the way, you weren't really thinking that I was STILL reading "Twilight", were you?)


I never do this but because this topic is pretty important to me, I encourage you to leave a comment in this post to tell me what you think of my resolution. Sloppy or a good idea? Can it help you too to overcome your Jcrew addiction?