This is one of those habits that can really save you thousands of dollars each year. Have you ever made an impulsive purchase only to discover one day after that you really didn’t want to have what you just bought?
I have, and I was throwing away thousands of dollars in stuff that I was never going to use before discovering a simple tactic to save money.
Games, software, high-tech, even books. These are all examples of stuff I bought that I didn’t really need or want to have.
You see, whenever you make any kind of impulsive purchase, chances are that you are acting like a zombie, thanks to someone’s marketing tactics. Do you really want to buy it? No, of course, otherwise you would not throw it away after a few days just because you don’t have time for it or you don’t know what to do with it.
So what can we do? Well, it turns out there’s a simple and extremely effective way to cut 90% of these kind of purchases (I’d call them losses), and it’s simply to wait at least 48 hours before buying anything.
Think of it like a period of incubation for you to clarify your thoughts. Whenever you go to the shopping mall, and you are up to buy anything that you had no planned to buy before seeing it, stop yourself and move away. Give yourself at least 2 days to decide if you really want to own that item.
When you do this, you are effectively avoiding most of the marketing tactics that only aim at making you spend your money in useless stuff.
The good news is that if after the next 48 hours you decide to not buy what you were going to buy before, you’ll also create a sort of future protection against that item, because your brain has already clarified its intentions (unless of course one day you really need it).
How much is this tip worth? For me, it has saved at least $10,000 in the last year, so if you are not already using it, don’t wait a single day before implementing it in your lifestyle.
Remember, don’t waste your money in stuff that you don’t really want to have.