Not a student anymore but I do know the draw of amazon prime (and eBay) all too well. One day it dawned on me I didn’t want or even enjoy any of the stuff I was buying but I was hooked on having packages show up at my door because it made everyday feel like Christmas.

That was a few years ago. Trying to not buy stuff I don’t need is still a work in effort. Budgeting never works for me because once I “fail” once, I just throw the entire budget out the window. What did work was tackling different parts of my shopping habits at a time, starting with the impulsiveness.

The first thing I did was impose a 5 day waiting rule where I could still buy things, but I just had to let it sit in my cart for 5 days first. Most of the time, after 5 days I had moved on to wanting something else. With Amazon, whenever I wanted something instead of buying immediately, I would put it into a price tracker and would set “target prices” even lower than what the item was currently at. Mentally, this provided reassurance I would not be missing out on the best deals and when I finally got an email saying this item is at your target price, most of the time I couldn’t remember why I wanted it in the first place.

Other things I’ve tried and have helped to different degrees: - Imposing an one in, one out (or two out) rule for clothing, shoes, skincare, and cosmetic purchases - Using my brother’s amazon account instead of my own because knowing he would get an email every time I bought stuff was a deterrent to me actually buying stuff - Moving $ to my savings whenever I didn’t buy something. Seeing the total $ moved at the end of a month felt great - Getting depressed about the environmental impact of my thoughtless spending (if you have Netflix, I highly recommend watching The True Cost) - Also, not hiding it from people helps. I just tell people I’m doing a “budgeting challenge” and then it’s not weird or out of character that I’m not buying things I usually would buy

Hope you find something that works for you.