How to Budget If You're an Impulsive Shopper

A family budget can be a powerful tool for understanding where your money is going and setting limits on your flexible spending areas. Countless families have used a budget to get their financial situations in order.

However, traditional budgets tend to work best for those who thrive on organization and planning, and that doesn't describe a lot of people. Many thrive on inspiration and impulse, making decisions on the spur of the moment. People who do that might see the value in long-term planning, but doing that flies in the face of how they live their day-to-day lives. Budgeting is difficult for those prone to spending every day.

[See: 12 Ways to Be a More Mindful Spender.]

Even with that challenge, there are still a few strategies that even the most impulsive of shoppers can use to keep their finances from spiraling out of control. These strategies mimic the benefits of a traditional budget and effectively form a new kind of "budget" for the more impulsive spenders among us.

Avoid credit cards. If there's one principle you should follow as an impulsive shopper, it's this one. Credit cards give you the freedom to spend far beyond your means. On rare occasion, this can be useful, but the vast majority of the time, it just enables you to get yourself into a real financial pickle.

The best solution for impulsive shoppers? Ditch credit cards entirely. Cut them up, throw them away and focus on making ends meet with just the income that you have. You'll still have to pay the bills for your previous card balance -- cutting cards up won't make that disappear -- but now the debt pile will start getting smaller and smaller and smaller.

This doesn't mean you have to lose out on the convenience of using a credit card forever, however. You just have to be smarter about it.

[See: What to Do If You've Fallen (Way) Behind on Your Credit Card Payments.]

Use a prepaid card for your impulsive purchases. A prepaid Visa or MasterCard allows you to have the convenience and freedom of a credit card without the risk of overspending. When you hit your "limit" on your prepaid card, it simply doesn't allow you to make the purchase, period.

Because of that, a prepaid card can be a great "budgeting" tool for an impulsive spender. At the start of each month, load the card up with a certain amount of money you can use on impulsive purchases throughout the month, then just pull out that card when you're buying a coffee or a book or a new sweater.

If it turns out that you've spent too much in a particular month, your purchase will be rejected at the checkout.

Use a debit card tied to a completely separate checking account. This is just an alternative to the prepaid card system. Since prepaid cards come with an additional fee beyond their face value, why not just open up a checking account at another bank for your "impulsive" spending, deposit money in there each month from your checking account and use the debit card from that account for impulsive purchases?

The advantage here is that you're not paying the relatively small fees that come with a prepaid card. The disadvantage, of course, is that you risk overdrawing this account if you're not careful with your spending. If you spend impulsively without even considering the balance of the account, this system can get you into a lot of trouble.

[See: How to Live on $13,000 a Year.]

Automate as many of your bills and expenses as possible. One final strategy that works well to help put some healthy borders on impulsive spending is to automate your bills and have them paid shortly after your paycheck is deposited into your account. That way, most of the time, when you look at your checking balance, it truly does represent your "leftover" money.

This strategy really only works if your bills make up a fairly small portion of what you earn so that you can feel safe automating things. For example, if there's a risk that you might overdraft when a larger, irregular bill comes in, like a property tax payment or an insurance bill, automating things to that degree can be dangerous.

Automating your bills is pretty easy. If your bank has a robust online bill pay system, you can usually automate all of your bills through that. If not, you can set up automatic bill pay with each company to which you owe money.

All of these strategies serve one central purpose: They put budget-like constraints on people who are impulsive spenders, reducing their pool of potential spending down to the smaller portion of money they can actually afford to spend. In other words, it turns the "hobby/entertainment" and "dining out" budget lines into real-world borders that anyone can live by.

Trent Hamm is the founder of the personal finance website TheSimpleDollar.com, which provides consumers with resources and tools to make informed financial decisions.