Focus Grouped: How To Avoid Impulse Buying

The thought of spending money in all the wrong ways often is linked back to the idea that you spend when you don’t have to, on items you don’t need (but rather want) and then live to regret it almost instantly.

Think of it in terms of impulse buying, a sure fire way to avoid saving money and live well beyond your means.

What impulse buying means, relatively speaking, is that you buy based on a lack of planning, budgeting and often end up spending when you don’t need to at the moment. The real key of impulse buying happens right after the purchase is made; you realize that you really could do without the purchase.

In some cases, the impulse buying is huge: cars, houses and other large-scale items you can’t afford, and there’s no going back on returning them.

So the trick is to avoid impulsive buying before it happens, but perhaps that is easier said than done. How exactly do you do that?

For starters, you have to not only have that always significant budget but also a game plan of how you want to buy. You’ll hear individuals talk about making lists before they go to the grocery store, for example, so they end up buying what the need and not getting yet another supply of this, that and the other thing that they already have plenty of; as inconsequential as it seems, you tend to buy more and extra when you don’t need it without a list.

Financial experts also agree the key to saving money is spending your own. And while that phrase itself sounds like it contradicts itself, it simply means that you should be buying with money that is yours, and not borrowing. If you don’t have the money to afford it with cash, then you simply don’t get it. Credit cards and even debit cards to some degree make it way to easy to spend with a simple swipe. Impulse buying feeds off the “buy now, pay later” philosophy that haunts credit cards.

An old trick when it comes to impulse buying also settles on a topic of conversation known as the 24-hour rule. If you want something, take note of it and then wait 24 hours. If you still want it after that period while you genuinely ponder the purchase, then you should buy it, but most of the time, you forget about it as a priority altogether.

Spending money isn’t going away anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean how you do it can’t be tightened up and fixed so that impulsive buying is a thing of the past.