It's Chelsea from The Financial Diet.

And this week, I wanted to talk to you about eight things

that you should cut out of your budget for just one month.

Our friend Erin from Broke Millennial

is actually in the middle of a no spend month as we speak.

And even though she's someone whose entire life is centered

around being better with money, she's

already slipped up several times.

And while it definitely can be very

beneficial to do a total spending freeze,

it's also just not very feasible for most of us.

So if you're looking for specific things to cut out,

these are great places to start that are

a little bit more painless.

You can try and do them all, or you

can pick a few from this list that might really help you.

And before I get started, I just want

to say to anyone in the comments whose comment

is going to be "I don't buy that thing,"

then that point is not for you.

I've never dyed my hair in my life, for example.

But many, many women do.

And that is a hugely expensive beauty regime for them

in many cases if they're doing it at a salon.

And if I were to watch a video in which someone suggested

doing a home hair dye, I would not write a comment saying,

I don't dye my hair.

I would understand that that comment is not for me.

Anyway, without further ado, let's jump right into it.

Number one is a snack with your daily coffee.

Now if you are someone who likes to grab a coffee on your way

to work, which is I would say sometimes my case,

although I try to be really good about bringing coffee

in a travel mug from home, it is extremely tempting

to get that extra snack item on top of your coffee.

And the problem is that so many of the healthy snacks

that you could get at a coffee shop,

like, for example, Starbucks, things like hard-boiled eggs,

hummus and veggies, a fruit cup, yogurt, et cetera,

are stuff that are perfect to bring from home.

Maybe you can't perfectly recreate that latte

or cappuccino you love, but there is nothing stopping you

from bringing yourself a little Tupperware full of hummus

and some veggies or a bunch of cut-up fruit.

And when you're doing that in bulk at home and, let's say,

meal prepping that favorite coffee shop snack for yourself,

you are almost certainly going to be paying literal pennies

on the dollar for what you would pay in a prepackaged item.

Now, obviously, the typical personal finance advice

here is just don't buy coffee outside the home,

which, OK, but for many of us, that is just not realistic.

Sometimes, I forget my coffee.

Sometimes, I'm just really craving

a coffee that's difficult to make from home.

Or sometimes, I want a second coffee item

after I've already finished my first one

that I did bring from home.

If coffee shop visits are a part of your life,

it's much more realistic to insist that you limit them

to just that coffee item.

And when you're telling yourself that you're

going to eliminate all those extra snacks you might

be picking up and instead bringing them from home,

you may find that that eliminates your desire

to go to the coffee shop anyway.

The point is you can keep some of the indulgences that

make your work life happy and productive

without making them overindulgent.

Number two is any hair, skin, bath, or body product.

Now there's a couple points here that we should really hit on.

The first thing is that as we've mentioned in previous videos,

it is very likely that you are washing your hair too

frequently.

And aside from the water that wastes

and the damage that potentially does to your hair

by over-stripping it of its natural oils,

it also means you're buying shampoo way too frequently.

And similarly with soaps and skin products,

it's often the case that we'll go out and buy another item

before we've totally finished the previous one,

whether it's because we want to try something new

or because we can't quite remember

if we finished it at home when we're out shopping.

Committing to yourself that for a month,

you will not replace any item until you have completely

used it all the way to the bottom,

and more importantly, you are only using it as much

as you realistically should be using it,

you might be shocked at how much money you'll

save if you are someone who, like many of us, I imagine,

tends to drop by the Sephora or the Duane Reade beauty section

a little bit more than you should.

Yes, obviously, keeping clean and moisturized

are necessities, but they are also

things that we don't need to be doing

as often as the companies selling these products

would like us to believe.

And on a similar note, number three is makeup.

So if you are a young woman with an active Instagram account,

chances are you've been targeted literally thousands of times

over the years with Instagram beauty accounts

that are always showing off these really

intricate and beautiful-looking makeup looks,

telling you about the latest trends

or shilling products that are apparently a must-have, even

though you didn't know they existed a week ago.

Now I am someone who would never judge

a woman for considering makeup a necessity

of her day-to-day life.

For many of us, tasteful makeup at work

can be the difference between being taken and treated

seriously at work or not really.

Whether we like it or not, we tend

to think that women who go totally bare-faced

look like there's something maybe

medically wrong with them.

And while you may not personally choose to wear makeup,

it's also something that I would never

say is an unnecessary spending category.

That being said, the difference between

your necessary maintenance makeup and all that extra stuff

that you might be dying to pick up

after you saw it on some blogger is very different.

Identifying the core items you need for your daily routine,

and sticking only to those for a month,

and committing to only getting a little bit more creative

with the stuff you already have on your makeup shelf

will not only challenge you to use the products

that you maybe don't use so often,

but will also show you whether or not you really

want that extra item when you have to wait

a whole month to get it.

I've personally found that since getting a Birchbox,

I have really satisfied that little part of my brain

that's always wanting to hop on new trends.

Usually, the products are quite small so they give me

just enough of that, like, maybe I'll love this.

Maybe I won't.

And 9 times out of 10, I don't love the product.

It allowed me to test out trends like the highlighter

on your cheekbones, which when you're really pale like I

am just kind of makes you look like the corpse bride,

and more importantly taught me that just because something

might look great on a beauty blogger

does not mean anything about how it will look on me.

So doing at least one no spend makeup month might teach you

the same things about what's really worth purchasing

Number four is novelty food products.

Now by novelty food products, I mean the stuff

that you just do not need in your daily rotation,

but you're buying because you saw it at the store or maybe

again on some Instagram, and it set off

that part of your brain about, like, ooh, wow,

that looks really cool.

Creating a month where you only buy

the necessary foundational items on a grocery list

and do not give yourself permission

to be distracted or tempted with really novelty,

interesting-looking purchases when you're at the store

may teach you that, a, you don't really need those chips

made out of some really weird grain you've never heard of

and, b, reminds you that half the time when

you buy those novelty food products,

you don't end up loving them anyway.

I'm personally very susceptible to the really fancy imported

yogurts that they have at the nice grocery store near me.

And I realize that when I'm being honest with myself,

it's really 90% the packaging of those items which

is always super, like, minimalist and Nordic and

considered.

And yes, a cup of that Skyr is only like a couple dollars,

but a couple dollars that I don't need to be spending and I

don't miss when I don't.

A month of sticking to a basic grocery list

might save you dozens or even potentially hundreds of dollars

if you're someone who's liable to fill

your cart with a bunch of stuff you

don't need over the course of a month.

Number five is clothing.

Now, obviously, clothing is in life a bit of a necessity

provided you don't live and work in a nudist colony.

But there is a very big difference

between clothing in general being a necessity

and all of those little items you're

liable to pick up by justifying you

need to build out your professional wardrobe

as a necessity.

The truth is nearly everyone watching

this video could easily get away with one month of no clothing

spending, not even just that little fast fashion

shirt that caught your eye in a window on the way home.

If you are someone like me who doesn't really

love to clothing shop and isn't really attracted

to designer labels, it can be easy to convince yourself

that you're doing pretty well when it comes

to not overspending on clothes.

But I could easily go to my closet

and point out five things in one minute

that I haven't worn in seasons or I don't really love.

And obviously, there was a moment when

I bought that item thinking that it

was justifiable in my overall budget

even though looking back, I totally shouldn't have.

So if nothing else, you can use a month

to just simply flag the items that you

might want to buy and check in on it

at the end of that month to see if you still

love that item enough to justify the purchase.

Chances are you'll have forgotten about that clothing

item entirely.

And if you do go look at it, there's

no guarantee you're still going to want it.

One month without buying any new clothing

doesn't just mean spending less money.

It also means rethinking what you

define as a need-to-have clothing purchase.

Number six is anything brand name.

Now one of the easiest ways in which we can save money

with the life we're already living while still making

basically all of the same choices is for one month

to commit to only buying generic brand things rather

than the brand name.

That's everything from over-the-counter medicines

to cookies and cereals and chips that we

like to cleaning products.

Most generic products are required

to meet the same production standards as their brand name

counterparts.

And many times, the products inside those bottles or bags

or boxes are actually the same products.

You may find that switching to generic indefinitely

on all of these products is not worth it,

but you may find that with several of the things you buy,

you didn't even notice the difference

that you were consuming generic and could save yourself

a ton of money going forward by making that choice