Money Mayhem

Since today is the first day of the month I thought I would start something fun!

February is the first month that I've kept track of my polish spending in an attempt to get it under control. Nail polish is an easy thing to get carried away with because you pick up a bottle, spend $3 and get a little more enjoyment out of  your day. If you're a stress-shopper like I tend to be, you understand where I'm coming from. As your collection grows, you look at a $5 polish that used to be too expensive for you and  pick it up one or two of them on a particularly bad day, (because well, it was just a terrible day and it's such a pretty color). Welcome to the world of retail therapy.

After collecting polish for a few months or years everything suddenly looks different. Spending $8 on a polish is normal, and on a bad day buying a couple of $14 polishes doesn't seem so bad. Then a new limited edition  indie collection comes out and you spend $10 each on 6 polishes, because you were fast enough during the restock to get them all (not everyone was fast enough you know, you're just so good at grabbing polishes on these re-stocks).

One day when you're going to put a polish in your drawer/shelf/helmer you realize it's full, there's no more room for that OPI in the OPI drawer and you couldn't possibly put it with the China Glaze, so you clean out some polishes that you never wear, sell them for about 50% of what you paid for them, and use all of that money to buy new polishes.

Then you have so much polish that you need to make a database just to be sure you don't buy duplicates of polishes you already own. My spreadsheet took me three days and I still haven't gotten to the last drawer of my Helmer.

So this month, I decided to write down every polish I purchased and how much I paid for them. I feel successful in that I added less than 20 polishes to my collection. I'm hoping that by keeping track of this I will slow down my polish-purchases so I don't go broke! It's already prevented me from those random Walgreens trips where I pick up polishes that I will probably never wear just for the sake of shopping. I was going to announce my monthly budget on the blog but I thought of something even more fun.

The first person to guess the amount in USD, that I've spent 

on nail polish this month wins the giveaway prize. 

Rules: 

• Open to US/CAN residents only. (With all of the changes in shipping I can't offer an international prize at this time but hope to in the future. 
• Must be 18 or older to enter or have parental approval.
• Limit one guess per person. You may not change this guess once you have made it. 
• To enter, leave your guess in the form below. Be sure to use an email address that you check regularly.
• If no one correctly guesses the amount in 4 days (or 96 hours from the time of this posting) the winner will be the person who comes the closest to the actual number. Any guesses after 4 days will become invalid.
• The winner will be emailed and the results posted on this blog. That person then has 48 hours to respond to my email or the person with the next closest number will be chosen as the winner.

Prize: 

This month's giveaway polish is Jindie Nails Pretty Penny (0.5 oz/15 ml) because the name was so appropriate  From the Jindie Nails shop description:

Pretty Penny is a new glitter packed full of glitters, shimmers and color shifting shimmer. It has light pink and light gold round glitters, wine metallic, bronze metallic, classic gold plus gold shimmer and color shifting shimmer that shifts from pink to gold! Absolutely beautiful! No fishing, applies easily!

I've read that it can be layered over another polish or worn alone (3 coats to opaque). I have a bottle that I haven't tried yet (darn that restock addiction)!

So what are your guesses?