I Resisted the 4th of July Sales and Saved $800

Photo by Cristian Escobar on Unsplash

I am a huge fan of sales. I almost never order anything unless it's during a sale. I could also flip that and say that I always order during a sale. Everything that I want is cheaper, so of course I have to get it now! For Memorial Day, I placed four orders totaling $982.98. Yep, I spent nearly $1000 on clothes in one day. Have I worn all of it? Nope. The worst part is that there was a "Spring Cleaning" sale a few weeks before that where I spent over $500 as well. There were random other purchases during the month that brought my total nonessential spending up to $2020.36.


June was better in terms of total spent: $161.83. But not at all better in terms of what I spending it on: underwear. I will admit that I needed new bras. I've lost a lot of weight and my current ones are gaping. Did I need fancy panties? No. But they were on sale and earned me free shipping. On top of that, I was heading into July with plans to order more bras. My rational was that I loved the ones that I ordered, and therefore needed an entire set of five for work days (even though I wear them 2-3 days before washing, and had 4 from the previous sale).

Enter my discovery of early retirement and minimalist lifestyle blogs. I hadn't ordered the bras, even though those three extras were still sitting in my shopping cart ready to go. Then Independence Day happened. My e-mail was flooded with sales alerts! One was from Victoria's Secret announcing that I'd get a FREE mini cooler with a $35 Pink purchase! I had $73.50 worth of bras in my cart! I qualified! And free shipping!

My other favorite brands were offering 20% off site wide! 15% off select items! 15% off site wide! 30% off site wide excluding clearance! 40% off clearance! A new brand that I had discovered and was super excited about was also having a sale, and it would be the perfect time for me to try them out.

I resisted. I resisted all of them. Sure, for three of these sites I had carts full of items ready to press check out. But I didn't do it. Those three carts totaled $355.22. If I had gone to the other sites, I easily would have doubled that.

I resisted.