I went through $120,000 in quick time. Yes, all of those zeros belong there. That was all the money I had in my bank account. I spent well over $20,000 at Amazon alone. To avoid bankruptcy, I took out a HELOC with a bank, a home equity line of credit. The credit limit there is $50,000. I have $30,000 spent. A far greater part of it was spent on necessary items like a car. However, I did spend some of it on myself. This scares me. I set the upper limit that I am at now, and have started to repay the line of credit about $500 a month. So this is a good start. By the way, that car was another “bargain” purchase of mine.

I tried to moderate that last terribly bad spending spree by purchasing items that I can later sell, assets with tangible value, hopefully close to what I paid for them. I did this with firearms. Some of them are collectibles. It takes months just to sell one of them, so I thought this would slow me down. However, the bottom dropped out of that market after Trump was elected instead of Hilary. So much for getting value out of my firearms. Notice how I rationalized those firearm purchases? I have always wanted to collect them, so this was my excuse.

So I can understand how this must feel. At one recent point in time, I had to borrow money just to survive. My menu each day was only lettuce, eggs, and soup. I lost weight. Getting back on point, I think finding a payee to give the money to is a good idea. An allowance can come out of that, besides all of your bills being paid.

I need to find one myself, a person that I can trust without reservation. This needs to be a person who also understands my problems. Maybe the OP can do the same. We have an incredible capacity to rationalize the spending of vast amounts of money. It all seems very reasonable and even justified at the time the money is spent. Over the longer run, I believe this is unable to be controlled. So involving another payee seems like a good idea to me.