Living in the era of technology has made impulse buying an
absolute breeze. Online shopping and credit cards have lent themselves to
numerous negligent purchases that continue to lead us to multiple financial
missteps. Feeling poorly about a purchase, especially if it’s a large one, is
never a good feeling. It has been said that shopping habits are connected to
our emotions, so feelings of regret are not conducive to maintaining a healthy
lifestyle. Learn how you can avoid making future purchases that will make you
feel crummy by reading below.
Looking to make a good purchase that will not only give back
to you every day, but also last you a lifetime? Look no further than Life Alert
Protection; it is time to invest in your personal protection! If you are
looking for a safe way to maintain your independent lifestyle without having to
use senior care alternatives, Life Alert can help. While wearing their
lightweight, waterproof emergency pendant around your neck or wrist, you can
summon help fast with just one touch of a button. No matter if you encounter a
home invasion, a home fire or even a serious fall, Life Alert’s dispatch team
can send you the proper authorities fast. Plus, with 24/7 monitoring and
availability, you’ll never have to worry when danger may strike. Grab your
wallet and make a feel good purchase by getting Life Alert today!
Need to get your spending in check? Real Simple[1]
is here to help advise you on how to gain more control over your spending
habits that will have your bank account thanking you.
Check in With
Yourself Before Buying: Being aware of the feelings that surface around
money is essential to making good financial decisions. Tessler strongly
recommends doing a body check-in the next time you go to buy a sweater or a
pair of jeans on a whim. “All the same emotions that come up in every other
area of life come up around money as well, so it's really important to
understand what is the emotion or set of emotions that come up for you,” she
adds. Before you buy that couch, sweater, or sneakers, stop, pause, and notice
what’s going on in your body—both physically and emotionally. Is your body
relaxed or tense? Are your shoulders up to your ears or are they down? Is your
breath shallow or deep? Are you excited or anxious? Mindfully observing if you
feel anxious while making a purchase could be your cue not to buy the item.
Ask Yourself These
4 Questions Before Making a Purchase: Before buying, try a popular
check-in technique used by support groups like A.A., called the HALT method.
HALT has us ask ourselves: "Am I Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired?"
Tessler explains: “If we can stop and pause and just see what’s going on in our
body ... we might stop ourselves from making an impulsive buy." By taking
the time to get to know ourselves better, we begin to gather more information
on when we’re most likely to splurge and what state provokes these actions. For
example, if you learn you often overspend when you're stressed right after
work, you can learn to avoid shopping at that time to prevent purchases you may
later regret.
Set Your
"Impulse Buy" Budget: If you're not currently using a
money-tracking app or program, now is a good time to start. There are many free
apps that make it easy to keep track of what you're spending and can even help
you set up a budget. Set up a budget for "food," "housing,"
"healthcare," and other common expenses. If you want to be able to
still make the occasional impulse purchase but just want to curb wild
overspending, make "Impulse Shopping" its own section of your
personal budget. Set up a notification and the app will let you know once
you've hit your limit. This way, you'll still have the freedom to make some
spontaneous decisions, but that spending will still be factored in to the big
picture of your budget.
Take Some Time Off
from Shopping: When shopping compulsions turn into a bad habit, you’ll
need to break the cycle completely before you can shop again in a healthy way.
“It takes 21 days to break a habit, so if you’ve gotten into the habit of
splurging, then you need to avoid shopping for at least 21 days to learn new
ways of being around shopping,” advises McCoy. She suggests staying away from
shops you enjoy and online shopping and instead finding things to do that don’t
require spending. Knowing ways to treat yourself that don’t involve buying
something can be extremely empowering. “You deserve something, too, but make it
a bubble bath with wonderful music rather than a cashmere sweater,” proposes
McCoy. After you’ve broken the spending cycle, try switching to a more concrete
form of payment—cash. “It just emotionally feels more powerful to see how much
you are spending rather than swiping a card and signing a machine,” she
explains.
Assess Your Needs:
While keeping a list of the things you actually need is a great way to cut down
on impulse buys, an even better tool is having a set of questions that you can
ask yourself during small, medium, and large money decisions. “When I’m clothes
shopping it can be anything from, ‘Do I really need this? Do I want this? Will
I really enjoy this or get value out of this?’” says Tessler. If you don't
answer "yes" to every question, you know it's time to move on.
Watch Out for
Retail Tricks: Being a mindful shopper also means being aware of retail
tricks. “So many of the ‘deals’ are trappings,” warns McCoy, “Buy what you need
now, not what you think you may need one day because it’s a good deal.” When
people buy things on a whim, they’re not letting the logical part of their
brain make the financial decision, but rather the reactive part. The next time
you're debating whether to buy a dress or a necklace on sale, ignore the
"deal" for a moment and ask yourself the questions outlined on tip #5
instead. If you don't answer "yes" to every question, it doesn't
matter how much money you're theoretically saving, you don't need to buy it.
Rein In the
Holiday Shopping Spree: “The holidays are like a microcosm of your
larger money story and it gets really exacerbated because this is when there’s
a lot of expectations around family and gift-giving," explains Tessler.
"For some people, gift-giving is their love language, for others it’s
not,” she says. Rather than let your emotions run the show, set up a budget for
how much you'd like to spend on each person or each gift even before you set
foot in the store or start scrolling online. It's easier to stick to a dollar
amount when you have one set in mind beforehand. There's a lot of social
pressure to overspend during the holiday season, but coming into it with a
clear budget in mind will help.
Halt your feverish spending and use your hard earn dollars
where they can benefit you long-term, like with Life Alert Protection. Buying
one of their high-tech, yet simple to use emergency medical alert devices can
be a complete game changer. Imagine no longer needing senior care and being
able to reinstate your independence with security and confidence. With LifeAlert’s emergency pendant, you can do just that! Simply slip the pendant around
your neck or wrist and when faced with a life threatening emergency, push the
button on your pendant and summon an emergency medical response fast. Splurging
on personal protection is spending your dollars wisely. So get Life Alert
Protection today! For a free Life Alert brochure call 1-800-513-2934.
Works Cited:
1.
Christiansen, Marla. “7 Smart Strategies to
Avoid Impulse Buys That You’ll Regret Later.” Real Simple. 19 November 2018. <https://www.realsimple.com/work-life/money/spending/how-to-avoid-impulse-buys >.
