Friday, November 14, 2008

Unoriginality

I feel like the world and his wife is probably writing about money troubles. It's one of those things that everyone has niggling away at them at the moment. But this blog is nothing if not about the niggles in my brain and as a blog starts off as an entirely self-indulgent medium in the first place, you know what you're getting when you come over here.

I used to be really good at money. I knew how much I had and was always able to say no to stuff. I don't know when exactly the switch flipped in my brain that said "you have money so spend, spend, spend until it's all gone" but I wish I knew what to do to switch it back again. I read a financial advice column in the paper about a girl who is in a similar financial situation to me (although she definitely gets paid more because her little treats involve designer names) and the advice was that it's a slog and pretty thankless but the only way to get out of it is to save and pay things off and stop spending. And I, in my rational mind, know that this is brilliant advice. And yet, I keep spending. Annoyingly, this is also tied in to the compulsive eating part of my personality which spends way too much money on food and eats it too quickly. So I know that were I to put a stopper on the spending, I would also be able to lose weight. Which, on both sides, would be amazing. Losing weight would also mean that clothes shopping would be a) possible and b) more fun as it's easier to go charity shop shopping at a smaller size. People my size who give clothes to charity shops tend to have really bad taste in clothes, I don't know what that's all about. Obviously, I buck the trend.

The worst thing about stinting is getting obsessive about the clothes I'm not buying and the food I'm not eating. I hate being the boring girl on a diet who can't think about anything else. Life's too short.