Goal Work: Worrying Less and Being More Financially Savy

I'm not going to lie, I haven't come up with some great solution to my ever present state of worry or the end to my financial woes.

I have however begun to let some of the little "worries" in my life go. Be prepared for a fairly un-interesting story to unfold :)

I love shopping, and even more than shopping I love a good deal. And as any good shopper does, I've signed up for about a million and one e-mail lists from my favorite places. Somewhere along the line I must have given them all my birthday too, so I was getting birthday cards and birthday sales all over the place last month. At the end of June, when a lot of those "birthday month" specials were expiring, I got very sad. I hadn't used a single one of my "birthday" specials! I seriously considered skipped my golf lesson (something I've already paid good money for!) to go visit Anthropologie to use a 15% of birthday coupon I got from them on the last day it was valid. Oh, should I also mention I don't really have any money to spend there anyways?

This isn't the first time I've had these types of thoughts. I frequently stop into stores because I have a coupon. The more I think about it, the more I realize that I'm 100% being douped. Those darn advertisers are just praying that my poor ass thinks that I have to get to the store to use my coupon. Like I somehow need more clothing, even though I don't have a clue what I'm actually going to purchase.

I don't like the idea that I'm not going to get these deals (let's be honest, in this economy, deals are piling up faster than a squirrel's winter nut pile) so I came up with an alternate solution. I've set my gmail filters to automatically archive, mark as read and label with "Shopping Deals!" anything that comes in from my shopping deal frequent flyers (At the moment that is Banana Republic, Gap and Crate and Barrel, I'll add others as they come in). That way, when I decide that I need something new I can go check out the folder and find some great deal.

I like simple ideas that work towards multiple goals of mine! I can 1) Stop worrying about NOT using good deals just because they are out there (since I won't even really see them!) and 2) I can save some money by not running out to use great deals on things I don't need but still have the deals for the times when I need them.

Consider yourselves douped evil coupon marketers...