It is amazing that some people are willing to pay so much for instant gratification.  For example, one company has made a fortune offering free two day shipping to their customers if they joined their loyalty program for the flat rate of $79.00 per year, turning many causal shoppers into regular purchasers of the company’s merchandise while also paying for entrance into the loyalty club.  Instead of making their purchases at the place with the cheapest price and paying the lowest shipping cost that they can, these customers are paying an additional fee and higher prices to have the items arrive at their home 2 days after purchase.

Spending habits such as these can be difficult to change, but there are a number of ways to resist the pull of immediately gratification and save some money doing it.  Delaying gratification is hard and many people have bought into the idea that shopping and spending money makes them happy and makes life easy.  Unfortunately, upon further reflection many of the purchases made for immediate gratification reasons are unneeded and costly.  Here are some ways to delay gratification and avoid spending money on things that you really do not need.

Create A Holding Pattern For New Purchases

Before making a purchase, write it down on a list and wait for at least three days.  After this time period has passed, review the list and everything that you still want to buy, you can go ahead and purchase.  People that put this technique into practice quickly find that the “must-have” items of several days ago have lost their appeal and are no longer wanted.  Delaying purchases for at least three days can reduce your spending by a significant amount and you will have less unwanted items cluttering up your home.

Schedule Necessity Spending Only Weeks

Many people purchase unnecessary items simply because they can.  By training yourself to go for a week without spending money on anything but necessities, you can curb your impulse to purchase items that catch your eye and replace it with a new habit of spending money on things that you need only.  With this technique, you will save money and save time by reducing the number of entries in your spending ledger.  Some people choose a specific week of the month while some people attempt to go for several weeks at a time without spending, so try several different methods to see which one would be the most successful for you.

Tags: money saving tips, shopping

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 25th, 2011 at 2:49 pm and is filed under tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.