FINANCE: The Importance of Breaking the Shopping Habit

To fully embrace minimalism and put an end to the accumulation of clutter and the amassing debt, you need only make one change to your life:

Break the habit of shopping for leisure.

FINANCE: How Old-Fashioned Advice Changed My Financial Life

When I was in my twenties, I lived like most of my peers: from paycheck to paycheck.

I figured if there was any kind of emergency, either my health insurance or my credit card could handle it. No savings account? No problem.

Any money that I earned that didn't right away go to pay bills went towards my social life, clothes and shoes, or vintage cars. (Okay, I may be the odd duck with that last one, but everybody has their thing.) Accumulating debt wasn't even on my radar.

I was fortunate back then that my plan of not having a real plan for an emergency fund or savings worked out okay and that I never really needed one. Pretty soon, though, along came kids and a house and all of the other things that accompany settling down and taking on more responsibility.

My credit card bills felt like anchors. The fact that I had no savings started to make me twitchy. It was time to get real, to look the scary idea of living paycheck to paycheck for the rest of my life directly in the face, and to do something about it before it was too late.

In researching my best options for getting rid of debt and accumulating savings, I came across one old-fashioned piece of advice over and over again. That advice?

FINANCE: Five Things We No Longer Spend Money On

My husband and I have always tried to use our money wisely and have never felt that we needed to buy things just to keep up appearances. These two traits were especially helpful when decided to really clean up our sloppy spending and use the savings to build our emergency fund.

I won't sugarcoat things--it was uncomfortable looking at our finances under a microscope. I can now safely say that a spending analysis is right up there will small children and leggings on the List of Things That Never Lie.

We had a tendency to use our debit cards for nearly all of our purchasing, which turned out to be both a blessing and a curse. With a card instead of cash, it was too easy to spend without actually feeling like we were spending (the curse), but when it came time to take a close look at our spending habits, we discovered that our bank had an online tool to automatically categorize where our money went each month (the blessing).

What we learned was that we had black holes in our budget that were sucking away our income at a startling rate.

The biggest culprits? These five things that we no longer spend money on: