How To Stop Shopping: 5 Tips To Embrace A Minimalist Lifestyle

How to Stop Shopping: 5 Tips to Embrace a Minimalist Lifestyle

Are you trying to live a more simplistic lifestyle and want to learn how you can stop online shopping and generally learn how to stop buying stuff altogether?

Well, you’re in the right place!

If you want to learn how to stop shopping, then you need to understand what’s at the root cause of this negative shopping habit.

Are you shopping because of stress? Or maybe shopping to cope with loss or other issues in your life.

Whichever this may be, we need to find the root cause and then we can implement an effective solution.

In this post, we’ll help you get to that solution and go over how to stop shopping by:

Finding Your WHY
Defining Your Ideal Minimalist Lifestyle
Prioritizing Your Finances & Tracking Your Expenses
Finding Your Weaknesses
Creating a Plan to Stop Online Shopping

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, which means I’ll receive a commission if you purchase through my links, at no extra cost to you. Please read the full disclosure for more information.

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Table of Contents

How to Stop Shopping: 5 Tips to Embrace a Minimalist Lifestyle

1. Find Your Why

When You’re first looking to become a minimalist and you want to know how to stop shopping, you need to first find a good enough reason to live a minimalist lifestyle in the first place.

So what is the main reason you want to be a minimalist?

Here are some examples of why you may want to become a minimalist:

Make your life easier
Declutter your life
Own less Items
Spend less money
Find joy and happiness

Next: Ask yourself if this reason is strong enough to overcome your shopping habit.

The goal here is to make your WHY powerful enough to push away any temptation to continue your bad shopping impulses.

I know nowadays with online shopping being easier than ever with just a few clicks, this addiction can be very challenging.

However, if you find the AMAZING benefits of minimalist living to be worth it, you can certainly end this habit and live a more meaningful life beyond materialism.

2. Define Your Ideal Minimalist Lifestyle

Once you have a solid reason to embrace minimalism or simple living, you can move on to choosing an ideal minimalist lifestyle that you find appealing.

Minimalism is different for everyone and can take on a variety of forms.

Think for a moment, and determine what you want your life to look like while also considering where you are now.

Do you have a family?
Are you single?
Do you have a remote job that allows you to travel?

These are the kinds of questions you want to reflect on first and then move on from there.

To get you started, here are some minimalist lifestyle examples:

Extreme minimalist
Nomad minimalist
Minimalist with a family
Balanced minimalist

After taking a look at this list, what minimalist lifestyle do you find appealing?

Again remember, some of these minimalist lifestyles may seem appealing but may be unrealistic considering your current situation.

If you have a family, it may be very challenging to be an extreme nomad minimalist, not to mention the type of job or online business that would allow for this type of travel.

Go ahead and brainstorm what you want minimalism to look like in your life and develop your plan to stop shopping based on this minimalist lifestyle.

3. Prioritize Your Finances & Track Your Expenses

Prioritizing your finances and taking the time to track your expenses will be a life-changing experience for you if you’ve never been able to manage your money well.

This is especially the case if you’re an impulse shopper and really have trouble with spending in bunches.

I was so financially illiterate and was very impulsive before I fully embraced simple living and watching my spending.

I used to order on Amazon way too much and spent (wasted) money that should have been saved or used otherwise.

However, once I was able to start tracking my expenses, I was able to realize how to budget my money and create intentionality with my purchases and spending habits.

It’s really empowering!

But this didn’t come out of nowhere, I believe one of the best ways to budget and track every expense is to create an Excel or Google Sheet budget spreadsheet to track all of your expenses.

There are tutorials online on how to make simple budget spreadsheets or you can use premade templates on these platforms.

However, if you’re the type to want a simple and premade Budget Spreadsheet on Excel or Google Sheets, we have created multiple budget spreadsheets for you to use in our shop.

By using the code SIMPLE you can get 50% off of any budgeting spreadsheet found in our store.

Furthermore, budgeting and tracking every expense is life-changing because it:

Allows you to find out where your money is going
Shows you what your spending tendencies are
Helps you to be intentional with your spending
Plan out your savings and how much you should allow for different budget categories

Ultimately, I want you to define items that you need vs what you want at the moment.

The more you can focus on differentiating wants and needs, you’ll be able to start taking control of your spending and thus live a more minimalistic lifestyle.

Develop Savings Goals

This will help to counter your spending habits and give you a reason to save the money you might have spent in the past.

Once you have some savings goals in place, this can help you to stop online shopping and buying random junk you don’t need.

These savings goals can also give you goals to shoot for like larger purchases or life experiences.

These savings goals can include:

Saving for a house
Saving for a new/used car
Saving for a solo/friend/family vacation
Saving for a wedding/ring, etc.

how to stop shopping, piggy bank with dollars inside

4. Find Your Weaknesses

Now along with getting a grip on your finances and limiting your needless spending, we need to find your weaknesses and determine why you may be impulsive as well as potential causes.

First: Think for a moment and determine what you tend to buy the most. Is it clothes? Household items? Decorations?

Next: Brainstorm potential triggers that cause you to shop online or want to run to the store…

For some people this may be:

Stress
Boredom
Tiredness
Too much idle time

Make a plan to address these triggers and prevent your needless shopping.

Now, what are the causes of your different triggers?

Brainstorm how you can remedy these and adjust your lifestyle…

For example, if you buy things when bored, fill your free time with exercise or reading, or some other productive activity, even a movie if you aren’t in the mood to move around.

Create a Practical Plan of Action

Here are some example strategies for the triggers mentioned above:

Stress:

Get more sleep
Find ways to remedy stress like long warm showers or baths, quiet stretching, breathing exercises, exercise, etc

Boredom:

Try your best to fill up your time and find a way to avoid the subsequent triggers.
For example, if you go to scroll through shopping apps on your phone when bored, consider keeping your phone in another room when you find you get bored after work or on the weekends and find something else to do for the time being. Do what works best for you

Tiredness:

Get more sleep/adjust your bedtime and nighttime routine
Take a nap
Read instead

Too much idle time:

Get busy and do any of the above-mentioned activities
Take a short walk outside
Pick up a new hobby

5. Create a Plan to Stop Online Shopping

As we mentioned online shopping can be very difficult to avoid with the ease of accessibility with our phones.

However, you don’t need to be worried or doubt your ability to let it go and live a minimalist lifestyle.

We have given practical tips to stop shopping as a minimalist, but to sum it up…

Here are the main practical actionable ways that you can combat your online shopping addiction today:

Delete shopping apps (especially Amazon)
Wait 1-2 weeks before buying anything
Leave items in your cart

Give these actionable tips a try and see if they work. For some, simply deleting an app may do nothing, because the impulse may be so strong that you may just redownload it when the urge to shop hits.

If this happens don’t worry, just try your best to implement these tips and find out what works best for YOU and your situation! 🙂