Managing Your Finances: A Trick to Help Reduce Impulse Purchases
This one trick helped me avoid countless impulse purchases
Imagine this, it’s a Friday night, and you just had an incredibly stressful week at work. You grab yourself a beer from the fridge and turn on the TV to watch your favourite sports team.
During a commercial break, you decide to open the Amazon app, and you see an awesome new Bluetooth speaker that’s on sale. You instinctively click add to cart and proceed to checkout, and before you know it, you just spent $80 before the commercial break was over.
You just made an impulse purchase, and you’re likely going to continue making more of them. An impulse purchase is any unplanned purchase of a product or service. It can be as small as a candy bar at the grocery store, to as large as a new TV.
Among Canadians, impulse purchases are prevalent, with 63% of Canadians having made an impulse purchase in 2018.
For the majority of us, it’s not a question of if you’re going to make an impulse purchase, it’s a matter of when you’re going to make your next one.
How Can We Reduce Impulse Purchases?
Will you be able to eliminate impulse purchases from your life? In the ideal world yes but it’s much more complicated than that.
Human beings are inherently complex, and companies invest millions of dollars every year to try and better understand the consumer.
For many shoppers, impulse purchases may simply be habitual, and if you want to drop a bad habit, it’s going to take time, energy, and grit. Although you likely won’t eliminate impulse purchases from your life, you can certainly reduce them.
To reduce impulse purchases, I rely on this technique. Say you’re window shopping at H&M, and a flashy jacket catches your eye that you think would go perfectly with your wardrobe. You know you don’t need it but it’s on sale for $50. You’re about to take it off the rack to bring it to the cashier, but before you do, you imagine this scenario in your head.
Say someone were to come up to you and offer you either the jacket for free or the jacket’s value in cash, which one do you choose? If you know right away that you would much rather have the cash, don’t buy the item. However, if you think you would still take the jacket over the cash, go ahead and make that purchase.
This may seem silly, but you would be very surprised at how often you would much rather take the cash over the item in question.
This is a trick that I have been using since high school, and I can attest that it has prevented me from making many questionable purchases. Over the course of many years, this can result in thousands of dollars saved.
Conclusion
Ultimately, this trick is all an imaginative scenario in your head, and you may still end up making the purchase that you later regret. However, this trick allows for you to take a second, and genuinely think about whether that item in question is worth spending your hard-earned dollars on.
