No matter what time of year it is, online shopping can be addictive. Add at certain times of the year like Black Friday or going back to school sales, there are so many sales out there that it might be hard to curb your spending.

Even though you may get a great deal, it’s not worth blowing your budget or worse yet, going into debt over it. And no matter how good you think you are at curbing your spending, it’s pretty stressful when temptation strikes.

So why don’t you do yourself a favor and add on some of these browser extensions to help curb your spending?

StayFocusd

This Google Chrome extension is a lifesaver if you just want to avoid shopping altogether. Sometimes you just don’t have the extra money to spend or want to purchase a need quickly but tend to get super distracted by all the cool gadgets.

What this browser extension will do is block website of your choice so you won’t even be allowed to visit them. For ones you do want to visit, you can limit the amount of time you spend there. For example, if you like to shop in Amazon for necessities but find yourself getting distracted, set aside 15 minutes so you have time to make your purchases for the day.

Alternatives to this app include Nanny and Block Site.

The Camelizer

While this Chrome and Firefox extension won’t necessarily keep you out of online shops, it’ll at least inform you whether or not a purchase you made is actually worth it. What it does is it track price changes on a wide variety of sites, like Best Buy or Amazon. They have a nifty chart that shows you the pricing history over a lengthy period of time of any product you’re looking at. Basically, you can use that to determine if it’s a good price based on that chart, which in theory should help curb some of your spending.

Rescue Time

This won’t curb your spending immediately, but what it will do is show you how much time you’re spending on different websites. Once you have this installed, Rescue Time will track weekly where you spend your time online. Then it’ll send you an email( (or you can log on) weekly and show you how much time weekly you’re spending on certain sites.

Having that information can be helpful as you can then set goals for yourself to spend less and less time on shopping sites. This program also can block what they consider distracting websites (once they have enough data) so you can focus something else other than shopping.

Google Chrome Incognito Mode

Ok, it’s not necessarily a browser extension but this little trick is handy, as retailers have access to your online purchase history and might charge you higher or lower depending on how much you’ve bought something before.

Yes, it’s nuts, but try it for yourself. And if all this is too much for you, well that’s not a bad thing as that might discourage you from shopping altogether.

Using a combination of these browser extensions will definitely help you curb your spending. Which one will you try today?

For more help on being more productive (not wasting time shopping) as well as reasons why not to shop check out these articles.

Three Steps to Get Rid of A Huge Credit Card Balance
How Can I Increase My Productivity?
Why You Need to Stop Buying Gifts This Christmas