Are you tired of being financial servitude? Are you sick of not having enough money to enjoy life? Would you like to not have to worry where the money to pay your bills will come from? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you’re a very average individual in our modern culture of excessive debt and severe overspending. The United States actually has a negative savings rate. This means that the typical American will spend all of their money in a year, and then borrow some more to finance their lifestyle after that! Our spending binge has got to stop, and one of the best ways to start doing that is by cutting back on impulse spending.

Impulse spending is when you make a purchase based on an impulsive desire to have the product, rather than actually having a realistic need for a product. Since we can borrow as much money as we want to in this world, we can almost always go get the item that we impulsively desire. Soon after the purchase was made, we lose interest and go on to the next object of our desires. It’s and endless pattern which puts us further into debt robs us of financial stability.

Let’s take unwanted spending by the horn and get rid of it once and for all. The key to preventing impulsive spending is time. There was probably a toy that you really wanted when you were little, and would do just about anything to get it. Chances are you’re not all that interested in it anymore. As time goes on, our impulsive desires fade. Most of the time just a few minutes is enough to dissuade us from buying something we really don’t need. With larger purchases, it might take a couple of weeks or a month.

So how can we go about delaying our impulses so that they fade away? There’s a few different ways. You might want to write down four or five questions that you ask yourself before buying anything of consequence, such as “Could I live without this?”, “Could I get it cheaper elsewhere?”, “Will it save me time or energy?” or “Is this an emotional purchase?” Asking these questions to yourself will delay your purchase and make you second guess your initial impulse.

Beyond trying to set your self back from making a purchase by interrogating yourself, there’s one very effective means of preventing an impulsive purchase. Don’t bring any money when you go shopping, and your impulses will never go met. You can go shopping, compare prices, and decide on all of the purchases that you want to make. You can then sleep on it, and come back the next day, get everything you need and nothing else. It’s a bit more difficult to shop this way, but you will dramatically cut back on impulsive spending and purchases you really didn’t need to make.

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