Ep 471: The 30-Day ‘No Buy’ Challenge That Can Save You Thousands
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Where are you? How do you feel in that moment? Are you cold? Are you hungry? Are you sad? Are you doom scrolling at night on social media? Where did you see the item and how much is it? Inevitably, when you do that, even if you don't do that every single time, you start to see patterns around how you feel and how marketing then plays upon how you feel. Hey everybody, thanks so much for joining us today on Her Money. I'm Jean Chatzky and...

it's coming up next week I want you to know that you are not alone if the climate news in the last few years has felt depressing seems to be the best word there are so many elements that we cannot control like the policies enacted or not enacted by governments around the world the corporations many of which seem to prioritize short-term profits over long-term planetary health and

But here is the thing: we can make a difference, and not just a difference in the world. We can make a difference in our own wallets, which are probably feeling

little thinner these days my guest Ashley Piper is gonna tell us all about this she is a sustainability expert and the author of the new book no new things a radically simple 30-day guide to saving money the planet and your sanity I'm particularly interested in that last thing she has a challenge for all of us a 30-day no buy challenge that will not only help the planet but also save us some serious cash

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I am back with Ashley Piper. She is the author of the book, No New Things. So Ashley, welcome. Thank you very much for having me, Jean. I'm happy to be here. I'm excited to talk about this. You write that at one point you were caught in what you call a work to buy swirl, the cycle of just earning to spend, rinse and repeat. What that feels like?

feel like and what was the light bulb moment that made you realize this was not making you happy? Yeah, it's a great question. So I, like a lot of people, had a traditional kind of career. I was a political strategist for around 10 years. And during that time, I became really personally interested in sustainability. And I just found it to be kind of a fun adventure in my life to adopt and figure out new eco-friendly habits that I could fold into my lifestyle.

And also during that time, because I was so passionate about it, I was interested in why many of my clients who were high profile or aspirational politicians weren't really talking about sustainability at all on a macro scale or on what I call micro scale, which is what you and I can do in our individual lives to move the needle.

And I decided like, oh, there needs to be someone, something who's messaging this in a way that's warm and approachable and doable, right? Because if you give folks the information, they're going to do it. And they're going to see how not just these sustainable swaps are good for the planet, but also how they're good for their wallets and how they're good for, like you mentioned in the subtitle of my book, their sanity too, and their time management. So

I was really excited about it, but before I got into sustainability, I was doing kind of the typical thing. I had a demanding career and I was working all the time, making a lovely salary that still kind of makes me misty when I think about it.

But I was so stressed out and so kind of disconnected from a lot of my life that I was buying and browsing as recreation. And to the tune of buying things when I was stressed, when I was happy, and the more we delve into the research on why people buy things and shopping generally, we shop, especially in the West and the United States,

to meet every single human need, perceived need, and emotion and situation that can come up. Like we shop as a means of celebration, as a means of treating depression, as a means of getting us out of our funk. You know, we shop for

all different reasons. We shop when we're in a panic and we shop when we feel peaceful. So shopping is really built to us as the antidote for everything that's potentially uncomfortable or celebratory that we are feeling. And I was very much a product of that. I had a closet full of beautiful clothes that didn't fit me or I forgot that I had bought. I still had tags hanging on them. I had a home full of tchotchkes that I had bought, you know, things

that didn't even functionally make sense, like pillows with sequins on them. You can't, you know, you go scratch your face up with that when you lay on them. I just had a lot of things that I had forgotten I bought. I completely bought them in like this zombified state when I was stressed out. And it really was my recreation. It was putting me into debt and I wasn't happy. Right?

Right? And so that's what it felt like. It felt really unsustainable. It felt extremely uncomfortable. So what snapped me out of that was my interest in becoming more sustainable. And I found those sustainable habits were also just great for my wallet and great for my consumption habits. They really pulled the mask off of this kind of autopilot consumption that I've been doing.

Before we dig into the change, right, becoming more sustainable, why is it that we're so wired to throw stuff at this variety of problems, right? I mean, the way you describe it, shopping, not just when we're depressed, but when we're calm or when we're joyful. The browsing that we do. I am a big browser. Me too. I like to touch things. I don't have to buy it.

But I like to look. My husband watches baseball and I surf the reel reel, right? Yeah, the visual buffet. What is that about, though?

Yeah, so there are quite a few reasons. And my book actually has a pretty robust portion that talks about the history, especially in the United States, of how we went from being someone like my grandmother who lived to be 109 years old, where she was washing and reusing tinfoil, and she had the same pan and the same nightgown for like a dog's age.

to folks who go on and buy this poorly produced, cheap crap, right, just at any whim. And really the shift you can see is post-World War II industrialization. We've got factories that now have to pivot to make things not for wartime, but for peacetime. And so they start making convenience items and luxury goods, things that folks hadn't even dreamt of, had not had for many years. You've got Americans coming home. They need jobs, so they're working at those factories.

And then you also have folks who have a pretty robust amount of disposable income. And you also have an advertising council that is really ramped up. They cut their teeth on advertising during World War II to get people to have these measured habits that were really good for the war effort, like victory gardens and making do and mending. But then after the war has been won, the entire notion of what the American dream is has changed. Purchasing becomes a patriotic act.

Having these items, you see the rise of televisions in homes, a really meteoric rise, actually. You see the rise in kind of convenience things like foods that are convenience foods. You see the rise of fast fashion. Before World War II, you really weren't able to go into a store and buy something off the rack that would fit you.

automatically. You would take it and get it tailored or you would make it yourself. So you see a lot of, you see larger homes, you see multiple cars. So purchasing, like it's the narrative because we really needed to stimulate the economy at home and make use of the infrastructure that we had. And so people start buying things.

So that's part of it. And then how it has morphed since then is that we couple psychology and sociology with advertising. And we also have advertising coming at us everywhere. You know, the exact numbers are difficult to pinpoint, but it's been estimated that the average American sees around 2,000 to 10,000 advertising impressions a day.

a day and think about it all of our devices social media channels entertainment channels are monetized to the health so you are literally getting advertising in some way shape or form all of the time and those advertisers and marketers pull emotional levers

everything from it's cold outside like we talked about you're in Philly I'm in Chicago the weather has been awful it's been so gloomy marketers know that and they know that the things that are going to appeal to us in that moment are going to maybe be things that remind us of spring things that tell us hey a vacation could be imminent to a sunny destination I mean even think about malls

malls, movie theaters, grocery stores, they're kept intentionally cold because the science shows that when we are cold, we are more likely to make impulsive decisions and less likely to think through the decisions that we make.

So there are so many reasons why we've become these kind of creatures of what I call conditioned consumerism. But those would be the two. We can track it historically. And then we know that psychology is always being leveraged on us when marketing is at play. Over the past couple of years, we've seen a rise in consumerism.

Being more conscious about our consumption, the rise of buy-nothing groups on Facebook and the rise of marketplaces where you buy things that are not new but things that are used or you give things away, free cycle. What happened to flip that switch? And then we'll get into the 30-day buy-nothing challenge.

I think a few things happened. I mean, one, the Buy Nothing groups and that book, for instance, came out kind of during and around the pandemic when people were experiencing certain shortages of things. The other thing I think is that people see that we experience connection through

through those, a connection that's so much more satisfying than this kind of isolated, very individualistic way that we've been conditioned to shop in the West. And so me lending you something or vice versa is a really reciprocally satisfying experience that we have science that shows it makes us feel freaking good. And now with the Surgeon General having said that loneliness is an epidemic as bad for our health as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day,

I think all of us are craving connection and we are craving community, but we maybe don't quite know how to go about it. So of course there are the financial benefits of like, hey, I got some patio furniture for free. That's cool. Or I'm borrowing a stand mixer from someone. That's great. But I think really that like touch point to community and the satisfaction of knowing, hey, something I have is going to someone who needs it and creating that relationship and communication is great.

just so valuable and so satisfying to us. It's so true. And it's the little things. I made penne alla vodka for dinner last night. Invite me over, Jane. So good. So good. I know. Strangely, I lived in New York in Westchester County in the suburbs. It seemed like every Italian restaurant had penne alla vodka. It seems like nobody has it here. So wow. I know. So I'm so making it myself. But I

was in a slight panic that there was no vodka in the house, which I thought we had. But for some reason, I quickly realized I didn't think we did. And yet I knew I could run up to my neighbors five floors up. And I don't think you borrow vodka, but I would just take some, right? She would give me some and I would be just fine. And knowing that that exists is...

It made me feel better. It made me feel like, okay, I'm not going to have to go to the store. Yeah. Yeah. And that's how we used to exist, right? Like, I mean, it wasn't that things, things used to be really expensive to produce and really expensive to buy. So most people didn't own one of everything like we do now. Most people didn't have a weed whacker and a champagne fountain and, you know, all of the bouncy house for their kids and stuff.

It was like people were sharing things in community because it just wasn't financially feasible to have one of everything. But now we have this mindset of, well, I have to have one of everything. That's like what people do. I don't want to borrow from someone that's like opportunistic and cheap or whatever. But really, this is how we survived for a very long period of time was relying on each other and sharing.

You started what you call the 30 Day No New Things Challenge. Yep. It turned into two years. So tell me about what made you launch it and how it morphed into such a long standing project.

Yeah, so I started No New Things as a personal challenge just for myself in 2013. It was around the time when I was very interested in sustainability. It was a lifestyle for me. By that point, I had left political strategy to pursue a career in sustainability. And I have always been the kind of person who just enjoyed like personal challenges. Like, can I read all the books on my bookshelf that have been languishing there before I watch White Lotus or

Whatever it is. I enjoy kind of seeing if I can do those things. So No New Things was something, just the alliterative name I gave the challenge for something I planned to do for just one month. And the objective really was...

to strengthen my sustainable living habits and really just see how far I could go with them. And it was to buy nothing new with the blessed caveats. Of course, I'm paying my bills. Of course, I'm getting repairs on my home, my car, myself, people and creatures in my household.

I am buying groceries new. I can spend money out for non-thing occasions like donations, museums, entertainment, concerts, eating out, vacations, all of that kind of stuff. And I can buy things new that may be best suited buying them new, especially at the time, like underwear and toothpaste, things or toothbrushes, things like that. And it really was just something I intended to do for myself for one month.

I ended up doing it for almost two years because I found once I got in the rhythm, the benefits were so multitudinous and so surprising. Some of them I just had never even anticipated and I really liked it. And then every year after that, I would do little no new things light challenges, maybe do it for a month just to kind of tune up some of those habits that I had by that point folded into how I live, but I wasn't going like whole hogging on the challenge.

And one day I had just shared with my pretty modest Instagram following, hey, I'm going to be doing No New Things, which is something I've been doing for a while. And the response I got was like wild. People were, I say in the book, it kind of reminds me of the movie Old School when like Luke Wilson goes to his office and all his co-workers are like, man, I need in this fraternity, like I

I had so many people and I'm not exaggerating message me and say, this is what I need. And this was maybe back in like 2016. And a few friends of mine who happen to have much larger followings also said, I'm going to do this. And then they shared it with their followings. And at one point in July of 2022, I had 12,000 people sign up to do no new things for that month.

And I thought, oh, wow, I just was doing this for myself. And a lot of them had said, you should make this a book because if I had something I could follow every day that I felt supported by, that would be awesome. And I'd love to know more of the history of consumption in the United States.

And the thing that was so amazing is I had experienced these kind of unsung or unanticipated benefits of doing it. But when other people started doing it and were messaging me what they were experiencing, I was like, yo, this is deeper than I thought it would be. And it's not just me who's experiencing some of these ancillary deep benefits. Like what? Talk to me about some of the more surprising ones.

Sure. People had messaged me and said, I've been doing No New Things for three months. I started doing it and then my husband got on board. And in that three months, we have gotten our finances in order and saved enough money and gotten organized enough to start the process to adopt a child, which is something we had been wanting to do for years. We also completely decluttered our home, which was one of the reasons we were worried to start the process of adoption because I think the

The way she explained it in her deliberation and her kind of personal fertility journey, she had amassed a lot of stuff in her house. And she was worried that adoption counselors might come to the house and see that the house and deem the house unfit. So they had completely wrangled all of that. And she had also realized a lot of that was emotional clutter, you know, from just the emotional experience that she was having in her fertility journey.

and she also said we completely furnished a nursery secondhand for this little girl and then a year later they told me they adopted a little girl and though i wouldn't necessarily say like oh no new things is the whole reason that this happened it was a springboard for them just something they thought would be kind of an innocuous challenge ended up helping them it's

really amazing how it takes you outside yourself. So I don't know if you know, in our community, we have two programs. We have Finance Fix, which is a cash management budgeting program that takes you inside your spending and really forces you to get honest about where your money is going. And over the course of our program, people are saving $1,500 on average in such a short

period of time, but they're also feeling more confident. They're feeling better. They're feeling optimistic about the future. And in investing fix, which is not about budgeting at all, it's really just about learning about the markets and how to invest and the ins and outs of the Wall Street discussion.

I've heard from women who said, I heard from one woman who said, I'm going to run for school board in my town. And this program gave me the confidence. Right? Like chills. I think that doing these sorts of things, we see ourselves in ways that we didn't see ourselves before. We have to take a very quick break. But when we get back, we're going to continue this fascinating conversation.

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I am back with Ashley Piper. She is the author of the book No New Things. What do you think it is about a

a challenge that gets people going. I've done two. I mean, I've done some that are exercise related. I ran a marathon. That was definitely a challenge. Oh, is that all, Jean? Jeez, that's a huge challenge. Believe me, it was a huge challenge. But when it came to finances, I did an experiment where I

I did not allow myself to buy anything on sale for six months because I realized that on sale were trigger words for me and getting me to buy things that I really didn't want. So I did that.

And then I did something called six items or less. I did that for the Today Show about a decade ago where you wear six items of clothing except for underwear and shoes for an entire month. And that's all you can wear. And I've never worn any of those things again, but I did like it when I was doing it because I definitely saved money and I saved even more time. And there's something nice about having limited choice and having restrictions.

I mean, you are absolutely right. Well, I think challenges appeal to people, especially if the reason why I honed in on 30 days is because that's the feedback I got from folks that felt like the tidiest number and the best way for them to start because they could do it in a month.

And so that's really why it's 30 days and not, I don't know, 28 or 400 or whatever. But you hit on something that is so right. And it's actually a nice dovetail also to the last question you asked me, which were, what were some of the unexpected benefits? And I became so much more creative and innovative.

doing no new things and I actually find I do in any kind of thing I challenge myself to I became so much more creative because that's how the brain works the brain actually needs parameters to butt up against to really flex and strengthen creativity like a muscle and so if you have the parameters of like no new things which really challenge you to get your needs met in a more circular community-based way as opposed to a capitalistic way you

you then start to change those neural pathways of like, wait, oh, maybe I don't need to buy that like insulated water bottle. Maybe I actually have something at home I could use. Or maybe I could ask Jean, my friend, if she has one she's getting rid of. Like you have to start like thinking differently and your brain actually loves that. That's how like research shows that's how you stay sharper and potentially even avoid like

normal cognitive decline as you get older, as you start doing things like brushing your teeth with your left hand instead of your right or taking a new route to work. Those simple changes actually help keep your brain sharp and strengthen your creativity muscle as well. So I think that's really great for you to touch on because I think that's something that is appealing to people. They want to see if they can do it and they find that they become better versions of themselves sometimes when they engage in challenges like this.

So let's talk about ground rules, because I'm sure we've got some folks here who are going to jump on the bandwagon and do no new things. I want to know what no new things truly means. If we're going to go down this road, what can we spend money on and what can't we?

Sure. So you can spend money on, and again, there's no sheriff here. I created No New Things, but I'm not going to be coming into people's doors going, tut tut, you bought something new off Amazon. That's not what this is about. So it's not a punitive, super restrictive kind of thing. It's rather building new habits, which I think is the most kind of important byproduct of doing something like this.

But there are those caveats that I told you about. Obviously, you can pay for repairs. You can pay for non-thing things, you know, like donations and outings and vacations and all of that stuff. You can certainly pay your bills, and you absolutely should. And that includes everything from, hey, you want to get your hair done? Get your hair done. That is not a thing, right? With this no new things, it's very much about tangible kind of things, right?

And then food and groceries and medicines and all of that stuff that you need to get to live well and you need to get to support your household. Fine. Everything else you are going to get via what I call, just for memorization purposes, the super system.

And that is an acronym for S is secondhand. So getting things secondhand, whether you get it from, you know, many marketplaces, you buy something from a consignment store, a thrift store, whatever it is, right? The U is upcycling, reimagining or repurposing something you already have or that you've gotten at some point secondhand or whatever.

So rethinking the utility of your items. There's P, which is pay nothing. So that's everything from getting something from your buy nothing group, finding something on the stoop in New York City, in the alley, next door free cycle, or someone just gives you something. Like one of your friends says, I don't want this anymore. Boom. So pay nothing. E is experiences. Now this has more to do with like gifting potentially. So say it's your birthday, Jean, I'm going to get you a gift. Okay. If I'm doing no new things, I'm either going to get you something for

secondhand and i can get new with tags items secondhand secondhand is just a medium by which you get something or maybe i get an experience gift for you or maybe i make a donation to one of your favorite charities so it's really like focusing on an experience as opposed to a thing and then there's r which is renting borrowing and sharing so some of what we touched on before but that could be everything from hey i need a sander for my house i'm going to rent it from home depot

Or I need an outfit. I do a lot of TV segments like you do. Maybe I need something kind of flashy or something. Rent it from the multitudinous clothing rental sources out there. Or maybe you go to a friend's closet and borrow something from them. So that's the super system.

just really an acronym to help people remember it, but it is a more circular community-based way of thinking about getting your needs met as opposed to the norm, which is us just going and hitting add to cart and buying something anytime we have an impulse to get something.

You mentioned ads and the shocking, I had no idea the number was that high, number of ad impressions we see on a daily basis. It's a lot. It's a lot. And I'm wondering how this challenge goes off the rails. The people who fail, why do they fail? How do they typically fail?

So I don't necessarily see anybody maybe needing to stop doing the challenge or having some quote unquote missteps as failures because I look at no new things very much as like you're a laboratory and you're collecting data on yourself because inevitably as you go through this process,

you are going, like for instance, I have people do something called track your triggers, which is when you really want to buy something in that two to seven tremulous minutes that really like the craving to buy something usually lasts. I ask them, where are you? How do you feel in that moment? Are you cold? Are you hungry? Are you sad? Are you doom scrolling at night on social media? Where did you see the item and how much is it?

inevitably when you do that even if you don't do that every single time you start to see patterns around how you feel and how marketing then plays upon how you feel and why that drives you to buy and when you see that you have just a much more clear idea of your relationship to consumerism right over time because the jokes write themselves the patterns are there it's like for me I'm like a nighttime scroller and that's when I'm suddenly like I'm old I'm

I'm fat, I need all these things to be different. And I'm no different than anyone else. We all feel that, especially women. So when I notice that people maybe can't continue the challenge, sometimes it's because they are worried that they have to be perfect and they have to do an all or nothing kind of thing. And that's why I said, there ain't no sheriff here. If you goof, if you have to buy something last minute, 'cause your kids have just so kindly told you that tomorrow is teacher appreciation day or whatever,

That's okay. Keep going. So really it's mostly I see people saying, I couldn't continue it because either I went on vacation or I had my wedding and it was just a bad time to do it or I messed up and then I felt like I couldn't get back on the wagon. But really to that I say, just get back on the wagon. Little by little, all these steps matter. And there have been people

Ginger Zee, who's chief meteorologist over at ABC, she has done No New Things multiple times and she does it over Christmas, which I think is great. She got two kids. She does it over the holidays, a time when 50% of Americans go into consumer debt buying gifts, right? But she does it because she focuses on experience and secondhand gifts for her kids and her family members. And she actually finds now it's become like kind of second nature.

So those time periods that I've noticed people might, quote unquote, fail, other people have thrived through just because they keep going. They don't feel like they need to be perfect. And I think that's the secret sauce to succeeding in any kind of challenge. Let's wrap this conversation by bringing it around to where we started, which is the good you're doing for the world and the good you're doing for your wallet. Can you quantify it?

It is difficult to quantify it in mass, right? I will say that for me, I saved $36,000 in the two years I did No New Things. And that's independent of all the debt I paid off and had a decent amount of it. And that was also during a time when I wasn't traditionally working. So I had left political strategy. So the savings was there. I know it's wild, but when you don't buy a lot of crap you don't need, you do see kind of some immediate savings.

savings. I think as far as what you can assume from individual experiences, if we rolled that up into a collective,

I think that this has the potential to reap so many stabilizing financial benefits for people and also strengthen community that we change the entire way that we look at consumption in the United States. And that, I think, would be really important because we really are a country of people, not consumers. That's ideally like where we should get to.

So I think that my goal is with sharing no new things that people find supportive communities and they find themselves parts of that. And they also see that their worth is not wrapped up in the things that they have and the things that they can buy. So that's my hope with it. But as far as the planet goes, the fewer new things that we are producing, which is

Of course, as we buy things, supply and demand is real. Obviously, there are companies that are overproducing intentionally without the demand even being there. But supply and demand is very real. So the more that we are doing something like this and showing, hey, we don't need as many of these things to be produced and imported and exported and whatever, it eases a little bit of the burden on the planet.

And the same goes for, you know, if you're buying things secondhand, things that exist are infinitely better for the planet than things that need to be newly created. Even greenwashed, supposedly eco-friendly things, right, which has really become

a new category of goods because the late stage capitalism follows everything eventually. And I'm not anti-capitalist, I'm just saying like we see that happen even with something like sustainability. It's the lessening of the burden on the planet is inextricably linked to our consumption habits. That is something we as individuals can affect and I think that feels really empowering.

Ashley Piper, the book is No New Things. Where can our listeners get on this challenge? Okay, so I mean, obviously in the book, the challenge is guided. There will also be if you want to follow me on Instagram, as well as my sub stack, there's a link in my Instagram for that. I'll be doing some more guided challenges through the year and probably through my life. So I welcome anybody to join up.

Amazing. Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you, Jean. I loved chatting with you. If you loved this episode, please give us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. We always value your feedback. And if you want to keep the financial conversations going, join me for a deeper dive.

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