I happened on your post while viewing "new posts". I'm not bipolar, but I do have a compulsive spending problem and have had since my teens.

While I'm thinking about it, there have been other threads in the Bipolar forum about this problem if you want to search for them. I remember that one poster said that he was going to start buying grocery store gift cards when he gets paid so he won't run out of food before the next payday.

I had the best results from a book I read by an author called Jerrold Mundis. He founded Debtors Anonymous, a 12 step group modeled on AA. The book I read is called "How to Get Out of Debt, Stay Out of Debt, and Live Prosperously". I recently learned that he has written other books, including one called "How to Make Peace With Money" and I want to read that one.

Even if you're not in debt, this book has good techniques to get control of your money. It does require that you pay a lot of attention to what you're spending.

I liked the book because it says that you can learn to control your money without understanding why you have the urge to spend compulsively. I'm not saying that's not a worthwhile thing to do, but when I started having problems, it was around 30 years ago and I wasn't able to get any help from therapists or reading.

The book asks you to keep track of what you spend and also to make a spending plan. It emphasizes that you need to include money for things that you enjoy in this plan - it doesn't ask you to make a strict, joyless budget.

I used to use money management software and download my bank records into it and they would pretty much auto-sort into records for my spending plan after I labeled the first few.

I think I have written this next bit before on this forum, but when I was having the worst problems in my 20s, I didn't seem able to think ahead to what long-term goals I'd like my money to accomplish for me.

Now that I'm in my 50s, I think that that is maybe the "hidden problem" of compulsive spending. It's not really hidden exactly, but it gets lost in the crunch when you're trying to figure out how to pay for food until the next payday.

My spending problems had been mostly dormant for a while, but I'm having problems again, so it's time to update the spending plan and start keeping better track of my money.

The writing style in the Mundis book isn't very modern, but the principles are sound. When I was reading it, I kept imagining him looking something like Jerry Stiller, who played George's dad in "Seinfeld."

Good luck to you with the money management!