One of the best ways to reduce your spending is to cut back on the items that you don’t NEED to buy. Every time you’re on the verge of buying something, ask yourself ‘do I really need this, or is it just another whim that will lie in a carrier bag in my spare room? Can I live my life without buying it?’
Those who confuse things that they want with things that they need will find it much harder to save money to repay their debts.
The ability to distinguish between the two will allow you to cut out all frivolous and unnecessary expense from your life.
You’ll no longer be the ‘shopkeepers’ dream’, clamouring to thrust your hard earned money into their till in exchange for more non-essential consumer items, seduced yet again by fanciful notions of how much their ‘special’ offers will allow you to ‘SAVE’!
Here’s how their misguided reasoning works. They think to themselves, ‘It should have cost me $100, but I got it for $70, so I’ve really SAVED $30’. And this is usually accompanied by their friends and family making sympathetic noises such as, ‘oh well done’.
You could be mistaken for thinking that they’d just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Shopping, not just bought something that was being openly sold at a reduced price!
Okay, if they NEEDED to buy the item then I would be the first person to agree that they’ve SAVED $30. But if they merely WANTED to buy that product then at best they’ve SPENT $30 less than they would otherwise have done. At worst, it could be said that they’ve actually WASTED $70!
But that’s one of the risks if you confuse what you want with what you need. If you think that you NEED everything that you WANT, you are more likely to be drawn in by consumer marketing.
Every time you buy something at a discount, you’ll be under the impression that you’re SAVING money when in fact you’re SPENDING more than you strictly need to. And even worse, because you think that you NEED everything that you buy, you’ll be unable to identify areas where you can spend less.
So let me spell this out. If you don’t need the item that you’re buying, then you are NOT saving money. You can’t be! It’s IMPOSSIBLE! This applies even if you receive a 99% discount on the product in question.
If you want to save money, then learn to separate what you need from what you want. And if you’re still not convinced, ask yourself why you’re reading a website about how to get out of debt. Do you really want to get out of debt? Only YOU can answer that question.
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Stuart runs a website dedicated to helping people get out of debt. So if you want to improve your financial position, visit http://www.icanhelpyougetoutofdebt.com for free, impartial debt help information.
