The thing that has totally eliminated my impulse spending is YNAB. The budgeting is an allocation system, where you allocate every dollar under your control to categories you set up. Every time I get paid, my wife and I sit down and allocate funds to mortgage, gas, clothing, gifts, insurance, and whatever else we choose. That is as good as spending the actual dollars. We each have discretionary categories from which we can spend without consulting the other. The way it's set up, if you overspend in one category you have to move money from another category, so you see exactly what you're robbing if you blow cash. The critical part of the equation is tracking every time you spend and taking it out of a category. Doing our finances this way has saved us an incredible amount of money over the past year, and we are totally out of credit card debt. Our bank balances and net worth are rising, and I can't say enough good things about it.

The best thing it has done is to totally stop my impulse spending. It wasn't hard at all, the desire to impulse spend just evaporated. I went from blowing thousands to spending practically nothing on impulse. It was like magic.

TBH, my fun these days comes from "spending" my paycheck (or any other funds coming into our lives) the minute it hits my bank account. I "spend" it into the categories of my choosing, and when I need to buy a pair of shoes the money is there waiting for me. I never have extra money, because in reality there is no such thing as "extra" money. When you have a plan for your spending, a dollar spent on something means that dollar is not available to spend on something else. When it's right in front of you in black and white, you begin to make spending decisions based on your priorities instead of your fleeting feelings at the moment. We have categories for fun money, vacations, dining out, and everything else we spend money on. I can't tell you how good it feels.

In a year we've sold a house, bought a house, moved across the country, paid off over $40,000 in debt and saved over $20,000 all while maintaining pretty much the same lifestyle we had before. Like I said, it's almost magic. Instead of having a pile of bills waiting for the money to arrive, we have a pile of money waiting for the bills to arrive.

You can control your impulse spending. You just have to realize it's ruining your future and make concrete steps to stop it. There are a lot of good ideas on this thread, but if you don't make the decision to implement the change there's nobody else who will do it for you. And you will pay, sooner or later.