Shopping Less to Find Balance

Today I read a post titled Joyfully Joining the Infrequent Shoppers Club over at Life As Mom. It tied in with how I was thinking this weekend that I spend too much of my weekend running around. My husband has also been complaining about my stock pile taking over the house. So, in a commitment to scale back my spending even further, I plan to start cutting back my shopping.

Currently I do my main grocery shopping trip on Saturday and hit other grocery stores in the area during the week to pick up their deals if they are something we use. Then on Sunday I typically spend at least three hours hitting Target and all the drug stores. Now I am going to cut back my visits to Target to once a month and the grocery stores to one main trip and one small trip each week. For the drug stores I will have to check their sales papers each week and make a decision based on that. I know that I don’t need to visit them all each week though. Maybe I'll pick one for the week depending on who has the best deals.

This plan is a work in progress. I may wind up adjusting it some in the coming weeks, but I must admit that I feel better already. Giving myself permission to not get every deal and knowing that I don’t HAVE to shop every Sunday is nice. Maybe I’ll even find some time to get back to my journal.

So how do you feel about your shopping? Do you feel like you spend too much time running around chasing after the deals or have you worked out a balance?