Bow Addiction? Wasteful Spending Contest Spotlights Ridiculous Buys

June 10, 2011— -- Hair bows, hair ties, hair bands. Four-year-old Kelsey has a hair accessory to match nearly every outfit.

"She's got tons of bows. They call her the bow girl at school," says stay-at-home mom Jill Kathan. It's an accessory craze that has cost the family a little more than $500. And it's the reason Kathan entered the Spendster Reality Check Challenge. The non-profit consumer education group is asking shoppers to submit a video detailing their wasteful spending habits for the chance to win $100 to $1,000.

"My 4-year-old little girl, Kelsey, is quite the diva. I think I need a reality check, because I have slowly created that diva in the making. I have a secret obsession of buying hair accessories for her to match EVERY outfit. We won't even talk about all the clothing she has," wrote Kathan in her video entry.

For Kathan, the bow addiction, which the family has had for a year and a half, only intensified after she met a bowmaker at a New Kids on the Block concert last year.

"I met another lady obsessed with the New Kids on the Block like me and she happened to run a boutique near my house and she makes them too," Kathan told ABCNews.com.

The reality check challenge is hosted by The National Endowment for Financial Education on Spendster.org, a self-described "safe haven" for shoppers to "share their stories on how impulse buying has wasted their money."

"The Reality Check Challenge encourages people to unjam their junk drawers and gut their garages to find those unnecessary purchases they have forgotten about or to acknowledge daily spending habits that have gotten out of control," spokesman Paul Golden said in a press statement.

"We all have these types of slipups; admitting to them may help people become aware of how they are spending their money so they can avoid repeating mistakes the next time they're at the checkout counter."

Want to discover how much you spend on wasteful or impulsive purchases? Check out the Spendster calculator to find out how much money you blew on a habit and where it could be better spent.

If you buy an iced caramel macchiato for $3 each day, you're spending $1,095 a year. According to Spendster's calculations, if you make the minimum payment on your credit card at the average interest rate of 9 percent, those drinks would end up costing you more than $3,000.

What do you waste money on?

"I buy useless stuff," said 15-year-old Kelli Johnson as part of her entry to the contest. "I buy videos I'll never watch and clothes I'll never wear."

Bean bags, caskets or silly bands…You name it, they bought it, as the videos testify.

"My name is Dan and I'm alive, yet I own my coffin," said a previous contestant. "See I do video production and last year I was shooting a funeral scene and I got it through my head that I had to get a real casket for the shoot." The damaged casket that was an impulsive purchase is now occupying space at Dan's home in the garage.

Another contestant had an addiction to soda. "I'm addicted to Diet Coke –a lot of it, everyday… This is a 44 ounce cup," said one contestant. "You can't even call it a cup. It's basically a bucket, a 44 ounce bucket… I drink at least 2 buckets a day." It's a habit she says costs her $90 a month or $1,080 a year. Over the past decade, that's more than $10,000.

"I'm sipping away my money. I am a soda Spendster," she wrote .