Emma Edwards, founder of The Broke Generation, came up with the ‘Rule of Three’ when deciding whether to add new items to her wardrobe. (Source: Emma Edwards\/Instagram) <\/p>\n
Having spent the year analysing my buying mistakes<\/a> and unravelling why my wardrobe has been such a sinkhole for my money <\/a>over the years, I came up with the Rule of Three: three questions I could ask myself when deciding whether or not to buy something.<\/p>\n I spent a long time working out how I could condense my learnings down into something that could signpost better buying decisions<\/a> in the future.<\/p>\n I deeply understood them while I was in the safe cocoon of the Wardrobe Project<\/a>, but would I still listen when I was able to buy again?<\/p>\n RELATED<\/p>\n I knew I needed something to anchor everything I\u2019d learned into my buying decisions if I had any hope of putting my learnings into practice.<\/p>\n That\u2019s what led me to come up with the Rule of Three.<\/p>\n This question began as \u2018will I still like this in three years\u2019, but I found my answer was invariably \u2018yes\u2019.<\/p>\n That\u2019s partly because I\u2019d tell myself I\u2019d like something in three years if it meant I could justify buying it<\/a>, and partly because it\u2019s hard for us to view our future self as a real person.<\/p>\n Psychologically, that person is a stranger, and the life they\u2019ll be living isn\u2019t something we can fully conceptualise.<\/p>\n By flipping it to ask if it\u2019s something I\u2019d have liked three years ago, it grounds us in the passage of time, and shows us just how much we can change in three years. What were you doing three years ago? Who were you three years ago?<\/p>\n Now it\u2019s not to say that if your answer is \u2018no\u2019, you can\u2019t buy it. You might not have liked it three years ago because you weren\u2019t a parent then, or you lived in a different place then, or you\u2019ve evolved and grown since then.<\/p>\n This time anchor is an important pause point to remind you that you change, and life changes. Trends or styles or even things we identify with can feel timeless in the moment, but actually may not reflect who we are when we zoom out.<\/p>\n This question has evolved from my attempts to make myself come up with three different outfits to wear an item with before I\u2019d purchase it. As with my first question, I found it was easy for me to barrel on through and scrounge up three outfits in my mind just to justify the purchase<\/a>.<\/p>\n By changing the question to refer to contexts, I\u2019m forced to not only consider outfits I\u2019d build with the item, but where I\u2019d actually wear them. This prompts a sort of mental visualisation of how you will actually wear the clothes in your real life.<\/p>\n Story Continues <\/p>\n If your mind goes to fancy dinners or parties or glossy work meetings, you can check yourself and think, hey, when was the last time I dressed like Miranda Priestly\u2019s first assistant trying to get to fashion week?! Oh, wait, never! Boom. Purchase mistake swerved.<\/p>\n This is an interesting one, and I need you to not take it too literally. Of course, it\u2019s unlikely that you\u2019ll wear an item every day for the next three weeks. I\u2019m not expecting you to rock into your all-staff Teams meeting wearing a cocktail dress<\/a>. But the thread I\u2019m pulling at here is steamrolling those impulse purchases of things that aren\u2019t quite right.<\/p>\n I have endless examples of purchases I\u2019ve made of things that didn\u2019t fit quite right, or that I liked in theory but wasn\u2019t 100 per cent sure on.<\/p>\n If I\u2019d asked myself if I\u2019d have been happy to wear that item every day for the next three weeks, I could\u2019ve caught those excuses I was making before I purchased.<\/p>\n The key here is giving yourself a pause point to assess the concessions you\u2019re making for an item that\u2019s less than perfect.<\/p>\n You can mould the Rule of Three to suit what works for you, and I trust that you\u2019ll trust yourself(!) enough to discern when your answers are signalling towards a \u2018yes\u2019 or a \u2018no\u2019.<\/p>\n The beauty of these questions is that they\u2019re complex. They\u2019re not simple answers that you can easily override with an impulse and a hunger for a dopamine hit<\/a>. They\u2019re things you really need to think about, and they\u2019ll get you thinking about how the item actually fits into your life.<\/p>\n Financial behaviour specialist Emma Edwards, founder of The Broke Generation, is sharing her radical personal finance experiment<\/a>: a whole year without buying a single item of clothing.<\/p>\n No new outfits, no second-hand finds, not even rentals. What began as a no-buy challenge<\/a> soon became a powerful lesson in self-worth, resilience, and the surprising freedom of living with less.<\/p>\n Edited extract from The Wardrobe Project: A year of buying less and liking yourself more by Emma Edwards (Wiley, $34.95), available 26 November at all leading retailers.<\/p>\n Get the latest Yahoo Finance news – follow us on Facebook<\/a>, LinkedIn<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n Emma Edwards didn’t buy anything new for one year and it changed her relationship with money. (Source: Emma Edwards\/Instagram) <\/p>\n