I just saw this interesting interview that CNN did with two people in regards to their 2006 journey where a group people and themselves formed a group called “The Compact†and its intention was to go through the entire year without buying anything new aside from the essentials such as food. Apparently the motivation to do it was to show how consumers excessively over consume the world’s resources which can be solved through other means such as buying second hand material or how there are so many times where you can replace things for free by doing it yourself or say getting parts from others who don’t want it. In general, I guess you can say the motivation was mainly due to environmental reasons. Here is a video of the interview for those who didn’t get to see it:
I think the thing to take away from this is that if you are looking at it from a financial management point of view there are so many times people say they have no money to buy essential things just to get by and when you see all of the “stuff†that they buy you can see that it is a choice that they have no money left or are dead broke. As I mentioned many times, in my opinion one’s habit in spending money is just as important as how much you earn when it comes to having enough money to buy the things that you want or need as even millionaires can go broke due to financial mismanagement.