( Joodie Shy )

In this post I declared that February would be a shopping free month for me. Outside of the necessities like food and medications I’m trying to keep my cards in my wallet and my wallet in my purse and my purse zipped securely CLOSED. The results so far? This was a bad week…

Purchases:

1 purchase from iTunes (for iMovie ’11) … $15.82
1 reoccurring payment to Mozy Home … $14.85*
1 reoccuring payment to Stamps.com … $15.99
1 purchase from Woot … $24.99
1 reoccurring charity donation … $21.00*
2 prescriptions from pharmacy … $37.15*
1 membership payment to Audible.com … $14.95 (cancelled)
Several total shopping detox fails at Quibids … $289.45

TOTAL: $434.20

*I consider 4 out of 9 purchases necessary. I needed the prescriptions for obvious reasons, my Mozy home backup saves my life, and my monthly charity donation makes me feel good.

Lessons: Obvious weakness = subscriptions I’m too lazy to cancel and major “possible” savings. Automated subscriptions are the devil. I always forget to cancel them or just can’t be bothered. Very bad habit! I don’t need that Stamps account and I haven’t for the past year and a half they’ve been charging me for it. Audible surprised me because I thought I remembered canceling that after the free 30 day period… apparently I remembered wrong (it’s taken care of now though). And Quibids! Damn you Quibids! I understand the principle, and it wasn’t that I didn’t understand I was spending money… it was just… kinda fun. But never again! I won some cheap bids and a gift card to target. But then I got upset when I lost some other stuff and paid full price for it anyway (a clever scheme they have going on) to recoup my bid losses. Seriously, who invented this genius money making site? They are so loaded! I wish I had invented it and didn’t waste time bidding on it. The big ticket items are so randomly won anyways it’s almost impossible to strategize (and I tried for HOURS!) The whole “wait until it hits 1 second rule” will not win you an iPad for sure. It made me very sad to not win stuff. But I did get a 14GB memory card for a dollar or so… too bad I don’t need any memory cards.

Pat On The Back: Got some stuff cancelled that I had been meaning to do for awhile.

Note: I’m kind of glad I upgraded my iMovie because it’s been a lot of fun to play with and it makes creating better content a whole lot easier. Overall, I see that as money well spent.

To Do: Cancel any more sneaky subscriptions I have coming up.

Click here to see my Week One Review or here to see my Week Two Review.

Here is a video I made this week with my new iMovie version. It makes me very happy because my dog is such a goofball…

Tags: dog, fun, happiness, personal finance, shopping, Video