Riding the river of life....

Ever feel that everything always happens at once? and its all just a bit much?

Since coming back from my holiday i threw myself back into work and started to prepare myself for the onslaught of the Christmas rush. Then i was knocked sideways by a few unfortunate circumstances, we we're working short staffed at work, which these days is nothing new, during trying to hold everything together my boss trundled off on holiday leaving me to run the show, again not a problem in itself. Then my work threw a huge curve ball into the mix, right before Christmas they are going to be changing the commission structure for our monthly payments, essentially meaning if you miss even 1 target by 1% you get absolutely nothing, not a penny more than your basic wage. If this was to happen to me i would lose out to the tune of about 300 quid on any given month. My mortgage was worked out by my bank to include my commission as regular payment as, well, it's been a regular part of my income for the past 10 years!

Penny for your thoughts?

I've seen quite a few blog posts recently talking about various "no spend" type challenges where people are challenging themselves to only by things that they've run out of or genuinely need (and things like food and bills obvs!) but not buying things that they just fancy the look of. And I've found myself drawn more and more to this idea.

Now obviously doing something like this would probably do my bank balance the world of good, after all I've a holiday to pay up and i did promise myself that i would pay off those pesky credit cards this year.

However, and this is my dilemma, short of randomly writing product posts about things like how much i like my toothpaste and lifestyle posts that way up the pros and cons of beans on toast versus beans with toast how would being a blogger work without spending a bit of unnecessary money?

I am a chronic spender, i'll buy anything if i can justify it to myself and i work in sales, thinking up reasons to justify buying stuff is essentially what i do all day everyday. But I've been thinking about this for a couple of days and today i was stood in Superdrug with a fist full of nail polish and the oddest thing happened, i went and put them all back and left empty handed.

I seem just to be musing over my thoughts here but i'm genuinely interested in what you guys think about this idea. Do you "take care of the pennies so the pounds take care of themselves" or are you in the same camp as Oscar Wilde and reckon "Anyone who lives within their means lacks imagination"?

Let me know in the comments below or give me a tweet (link in the sidebar)

And just in case you were wondering this is currently my favourite toothpaste :-)