A common misconception is that winter is the hardest season when it comes to dressing. You have to buy a heavy-duty jacket that is warm enough, wind resistant, protects your thighs, cooks lunch for you and serves as your personal secretary. The same goes for your boots, but on top of all of that, they have to be water-resistant and whatever the opposite of slippery is. It is quite challenging, but it has nothing on spring. Spring is the real scallywag as it presents itself as something not to worry about, whilst the situation can’t be more different. There is actually much to worry about when it comes to spring.

When the time comes for winter to take its cold, violent behavior somewhere else, another oppressor takes winter’s place. While winter’s harassment is manifested, spring does a different kind of bullying – latent bullying. Each year, spring starts off like a friend, a companion, someone you can trust. Its high temperatures in comparison to the winter’s temperatures make us trust spring and it’s the thing that makes us relax in time. In all our relaxation, we give ourselves up to spring, only to have that devious, deceitful, shifty maniac stab us in the back.

It’s like this – you went out just before sundown, leaving your jacket at home because, you know, it wasn’t so cold. Soon enough you start to feel chilly, then a little cold and, before you know it, you are freezing your ears off. Bam, a stab in the back!

Also, every year, spring decides to change what is fashionable and what is not, so each year you’ll end up looking like a last-year-spring enthusiast, with your last-year clothing that is soooo last year. That’s what spring does. It hates us all and now it’s our time to fight back.

Limit your spending

Often with every shift in season ton of money is spent on new clothes. This makes life a living hell, because now you have to explain to your children why the college fund is now called ‘spring shopping fund’. However, there are ways to save the college fund and still have a clean pair of pants for work tomorrow. Also, you can have a clean pair of socks, underwear and a clean T-shirt on a daily basis while also providing college education for your children.

The tactics are numerous, but there are a few strategies that lead the race. Maneuvers like saying good-bye to name brands, taking advantage of discounts, combining your clothes in a more thought-out way and buying in bulk can really get you far. Let’s see how exactly.

Bye-bye designer clothes

What’s really the deal with designer brands? All they represent is a status symbol, wealth, commodity, even a privilege. Who would even want that? Well, everybody honestly, but even though it might actually sound attractive, it really doesn’t have much of anything else to offer.

Now, let’s not deceive ourselves, most designer names do make high-quality clothes, but so do many other less known manufacturers. Tons of unknown companies make quality clothes that are as fancy as the designer clothes, but they come at far lower cost. Forget about fake extravagancy and bogus sophistication, college fund is much more important. By buying non-designer clothes you’ll end up having a totally new wardrobe every season at a lower price than wearing a designer brand for who-knows-how-many seasons…and you know we are right because we use the special scientific measurement called ‘who-knows-how-many’.

Take advantage of special offers

Special or not, discounts, sales and off-season deals are a great way to save up some cash. They present a great opportunity to even score some famous brands at low prices and thus fill the void that was created when you decided to say goodbye to them. Also, off-season sales are a great way to stock up on clothes for the season that’s nowhere near, and it will also teach you to make your plans in advance. In general, off-season sales might even help you organize your life better than ever. They are miraculous.

Smart clothing combination

Since you are trying to limit your spending, you can’t just go out and buy everything you like, put it in the wardrobe and forget about it for the next season or two. You have to be efficient and make the most of what you’ve got which also means you have to unleash your inner creativity that you have long forgotten about.

The trick is to think before you buy. Not only do you have to think about what you are buying, but you have to remember every single piece of clothing that you have in the wardrobe. Each sweater - each T-shirt, each pair of pants, their color, the style and every possible combination you can make with them. How does your potentially new piece of clothes fit in? It doesn’t? Then don’t buy it. You only buy clothes that fit with what you already have – you buy similar style and similar colors and generally clothes that can be matched with oneanother.

Buy loads of clothes

Well, this sounds like it’s in direct confrontation with everything that was said until now, but it actually isn’t. You should buy tons of clothes, but not at regular price. You should buy in bulk. This way, you accomplish two things simultaneously – you limit your spending while you acquire a lot of different clothes that can be worn whole season. You kill two birds with one stone and if you count the college fund which will stay alive, you can even kill a few more birds.

Now, buying in bulk isn’t all that easy as you have to spend a lot of time on discovering the precise thing that you need, but in the end, it does pay off. When you finally find what you are looking for, you might even go so berserk that you forget about what you actually need and start buying everything – underwear in bulk, bulk T-shirts, wholesale socks, light bulbs, bathroom tiles, ashtrays…and you don’t even smoke. There goes the college fund again.