Saving money means more than buying cheaply. Sometimes it means not buying at all or waiting a while to buy something until it has lowered in cost, not necessarily gone on sale.
Saving money means avoiding the pitfalls that others can fall into such as buying that new techno toy as soon as it comes out, when the supply is short, the demand is long and the prices reflect that.
Once and item has gone onto the shelves and seen three months even of serious buying the prices begin to go down significantly and you’re going to get a much better deal than if you bought it hot off the presses. It’s a sad fact that the reason many people buy something is that it’s new, it’s cool or interesting and the neighbor just can’t have some cool new toy that you don’t have even if he paid through the nose for it.
Master what is known as the ten day rule of thumb. In our household we have a rule that if something we want costs more than twenty dollars and it’s an unnecessary expense then we have to wait ten days. In doing so we very often find out that the purchase isn’t something we really want or need and that we can live without it quite nicely, or wait until the item has dropped in price before we buy it.
Impulse buying is one of the biggest ways that people waste money and spend more than they have. If you take trips to the store for a gallon of milk and come home with a new DVD player, then chances are good that you need a ten day rule or something like it at your house too.
Getting your finances in order very often means that you merely need to learn to spend more wisely. You may not be in debt over your head, you may be spending money that you don’t have on items that you truly don’t need or could get a lot more cheaply than you do.
Many of us don’t have a lot of credit card or other debt. Our houses may be less than a palace and our payments are not all that high but we still find that we’ve got problems paying the bills at the end of the month. In many cases this tends to be due to the cost of that impulse buying that we let ourselves fall into in order to get those new toys that are state of the art.
Saving money means avoiding all of those traps and learning that the new cool toy will still be just as cool when it has dropped fifty dollars in price and that you will not be tired of it and ready to sell at that point, as the guy who had it early on probably already is.
Tags: avoiding credit card traps, avoiding impulse buying, credit card debt, how to avoid credit pitfalls, saving money, saving money on credit cards