Welcome to the Richard Butler Creagh blog. Technology  has given consumers revolutionary access to shopping opportunities. You can shop at any time of the day, literally! From your phone or tablet, debit, credit, store cards, gift cards and etc. The list is endless. There probably has never been a tougher time to resist the temptation to overspend. A few impulsive clicks and your carefully planned monthly budget is dead. So the immortal question is how can I limit my spending?

Since the root of the problem may be the limitless access to opportunities for spending money, try these following tips from Richard Butler-Creagh – a financial expert:

Send direct deposits into a savings account. Most people have their paychecks deposited into a checking account, where their salary becomes immediately available for spending. Instead, have your paycheck go into savings, and transfer only a budgeted amount every month into checking to meet your expenses.

Electronic transactions can be hard to keep track of on the fly, and they don’t give you an instinctive sense of when you have spent too much. Try using cash for daily expenses, subject to a budgeted allowance amount. This will make it more obvious when you have run through your budget for the week.

Get out of the practice of carrying credit and debit cards with you at all times. Consistent with the idea of doing things more on a cash basis, leave the credit and debit cards in a secure place and take them out only to make budgeted purchases. Consider also dropping time-saving measures like “one-click” shopping where you store all your credit card information with an online retailer. Make shopping online harder to accomplish, not easier.

Don’t buy things until you have three price comparisons. When you do buy something out of the ordinary, make yourself shop around. You might save by finding a better deal, and in any case this discipline may slow you down enough for some spending impulses to wear off. Yes, hunt for the online coupon!

Modern technology allows spending money to occur almost quickly. What the techniques listed above all have in common is that they attempt to slow down the process of spending money. The idea is that with a little more time to think, you might make wiser decisions about how to spend your money.

Learn more about Richard Butler Creagh, the founder of Henley Finance. Read more about Henley Finance which is a bridging lender company that invests in UK property here.

You can also watch Richard Butler Creagh Youtube video here: