How does making a budget reduce impulse shopping? Now, some of you reading this may not know what budgeting is, so here is a reliable definition: according to Consumer.gov, “A budget is a plan you write down to decide how you will spend your money each month. A budget helps you make sure you will have enough money every month. Without a budget, you might run out of money before your next paycheck.” Budgets are extremely helpful if you have a job and you have to pay for different thing. Here is an example of a way to budget that some people might use: These people ,every month, cash in their paychecks and divide the cash into different piles for different things they need to pay for. They then put the different piles of money into different envelopes each labeled after the different pile of money put into it. For example, the pile of money labeled Bills goes into the Bills envelope, or the Groceries pile goes into the Groceries envelope, or the Savings pile goes into the Savings envelope. Some people do this, except online. I think that this type of budgeting woks best for me. Maybe one of these other forms of budgeting works best for you. Some other forms of budgeting are the zero-based budget, best for tracking consistent income and expenses; the pay-yourself-first budget, best for prioritizing savings and debt repayment; the envelope system budget (what I just explained to you), best for making your spending more disciplined; the 50/30/20 budget, best for categorizing “needs” over “wants”; and the no-budget budget, best for lowering and avoiding debt. You can chose the best way to budget for you depending on where you are in life.

What is impulse shopping? In my own words, I think that impulse shopping refers to buying something because you like it. According to Verywell Mind, “Impulse shopping involves buying items that a person was not planning to purchase.” Both of these definitions are true. For example, you could be at a store buying groceries, and then, all of a sudden, you see something that you like, and you end up buying it. You bought because you liked it, but you were not planning on buying it. That is impulse shopping.

How does making a budget reduce impulse shopping? What I think, is that a lot of people impulse shop, but what if you impulse shopped so much, that you did not have enough money for you bills that you have to pay for? If you budgeted (lets use my envelope example used earlier) and you put your money into the several different envelopes, when you go shopping, you know how much money you are able to spend. You may even have an envelope labeled Impulse Shopping, and that is the total amount of money you can use on impulse shopping, and that is fine. But if you budget, you have a better chance of resisting impulse shopping, which can quickly deprive us of our money.