Mandy: Igniting Your Desire to Splurge Until It Disintegrates

Moving can sometimes be a sad ritual as you throw, throw and throw more junk away, only to realize that you actually paid good money accumulating “them”.

Let’s face it. Most of us have a little special something we like to spend money on. Whether it’s cars, HDTVs, luxury vacations, hand bags, shoes or even ice cream, we simply identify the following equation as fact.

Stuff We Love > Price We Pay

Lately, I’m starting to come around on splurging. I used to think that it’s not okay to spend money on non-essentials, but I don’t feel that spending a few bucks to make me happy is all that bad anymore. More truthfully, I am not afraid of buying anymore. After all, we work hard to earn money just so we can spend it. I think spending is okay if:

You know what the consequences are.
You have logically thought about it, as opposed to being pushed by emotions.
Owning it actually makes your life better and/or you happier, even if it’s temporary.

But what if you thought about it, know that it’s useless but still can’t seem to control your desires? Here’s what you should do.

Buy it.

Yes, that’s right. But after you do, leave it out in a visible place in your house even after you are done with it. Some examples…

Don’t put away those shoes in the depths of your closet. Stack them neatly in your shoe racks so you see them every time you need a pair of shoes.
Don’t throw away your magazines and comic books once you are done and don’t put them in a box tucked in the corner of your storage, organize them in your room’s bookshelf. Once they overflow, start stacking them all over (hopefully neatly).
Keep the boxes of the electronics that you bought and put them in your closet so you can see them every day.

You see. Part of the problem with spending is that we never truly see the consequences of our actions until it’s too late. It’s only a couple dollars to buy a cup of coffee, but if someone will give us $100,000 dollars to never have Starbucks again, it will make us think twice before taking another sip. This is because in the latter case, we clearly see the long term results of our immediate actions.

Along the same lines, once you start seeing how much you are starting to accumulate daily, you will understand just how much money you’ve spent on whatever you’ve been buying. Instead of just having an idea of how much you waste, you will eventually know. Some time after you know, you will start to feel it in your gut. It’s like a light bulb that turns on, because only then will you be able to decide whether you should keep buying or not.

Practicing this will be cumbersome and it will never stop you from buying something now. But, it will give you a choice in the future.

I moved, and we threw and gave SO MUCH away. Perhaps more appropriately put, I just had a date with the trash collector.

—
Related Articles at Personal Finance Blog by Money Ning: