More DOLLAR$ AND $EN$E Blogs
- Til DEBT Do Us Part
- Bank On It
- Retirement Planning Starts Sooner Than You Think… like NOW!
- Pay Yourself First
- Financial Storms
- A 'TAXING' TOPIC
- Free or Fee?
- Money Tips: Review Part Two
- Money Tips: Review Part One
- Is Money Important?
- Give Yourself Credit
- INVESTING - Make Money While You Sleep
- Hey Big Spender
- I'm not afraid of the Big Bad Money
- Need vs Want
- Shhh... Money Makes the World Go Around
- Quiz - What's your money style?
- Summer's here...NOW SHOW ME THE MONEY!
- Can Money Make You Happy?
- $AVE ME!
March 2008 Blogs
- Real Girl - Krista
- Understanding Cancer
- How is Your PURSE Like your Mind?
- SAPPHO: The Poetess of Greece
- Hey Big Spender
- Ask A Guy - best quality, 1 million dollars, daydreams, fave sport
- Facing Fears - a real life story
- Bored? What to do this March Break
- Going Shopping, it's all about the packaging!
- BFF Today... Dissed Tomorrow!
Hey Big Spender
DOLLAR$ and $EN$E, March 2008, by Brian Bogaert
HEY Big
Spender!
Are you being convinced to
buy more stuff than you need
without even realizing it?
Hey girls, thanks again to everyone who has written in to my column with lots of cool ideas. This issue, I want to address a topic that comes up often: how do I control my spending?! We’ve already had a column on NEED vs WANT with lots of tips about making decisions, and we’ve discussed what kind of money person you are (a spender or a saver). So this time we’re going to talk about what’s going on out there that make you want to spend your money, some clever techniques you may not realize.
Have you ever noticed that candy and junk foods are usually closest to the check-out at the grocery store? Why do you think chocolate bars and chips come in such colourful wrappers and have cool names? Did you ever buy clothes that seemed to wear out really fast? Or did something you bought break down too soon? And just how many ‘BIGGEST SALE OF THE YEAR’s’ can a store have anyway??
Keep Shopping!
Let’s face it, companies and stores WANT you to buy their stuff so they can make more money... and they’ll go to almost any length to make that happen. They want you to be a CONSUMER which is someone who purchases and uses their goods and services. If you aren’t prepared, if you don’t keep track of how much you spend, and if you don’t practice some willpower, you’ll find that you’re always going to have a lot of STUFF with little or no MONEY. And the other part is that a lot of the stuff we buy that is so convenient and cute and on sale is not really all that good for us anyway. It can often be unhealthy or unsafe or just plain useless.
Pushy Advertising
I don’t know about you, but lately it has seemed to me that the more commercials and ads I see for certain products, the worse it actually less impressed I actually am when I finally buy it! Is it possible that we’re actually buying things with the hope of who it will make us be rather than because of what it actually IS? It’s like the people who made these things KNOW it’s kind of lousy so they have to pump it up as much as possible so that people will be convinced to buy it. Did you ever notice that mansions, private Jets and Ferrari’s aren’t advertised on TV? They don’t have to... everyone already knows that stuff is awesome and want it even before they can afford it. So if Yu keep spending all your money on candy, lip gloss, tank tops, fries, shoes and all the other STUFF the stores convince you to have to have, you may never live in a mansion, fly around in your own jet, or drive a Ferrari. You will however continue to be a CONSUMER, exactly the way big companies want you to be.
Shop Wisely
Once again, I’m not saying you shouldn’t buy stuff or ever have any fun. All I’m saying is that every time you buy something you don’t really NEED just because it’s there or on sale, you lose the opportunity to make more money with the money you currently have. If you resist, you are taking control of your future (work if you want to, not because you have to for example). In a future article I will talk about how to make your money WORK FOR YOU so you don’t have to work SO HARD for it.
The CYCLE!
So why do companies want us to be CONSUMERS? Good question! The answer is because the more you believe you need to get new stuff, the more money they can make selling their products. It’s a big cycle – companies advertise to us and convince us that we don’t have the latest style, we need new stuff because the old stuff isn’t any good anymore or that something bad may happen to us if we don’t use their stuff (like not fitting in). So we rush out and buy this ‘stuff’ only to come home and find out it really isn’t all they said it was. And so we sit back down in front of the TV and more commercials tell us about what we NOW need in order to feel happy, beautiful, safe, thin or whatever, and we go back around the cycle AGAIN. In a recent presentation I saw on the Internet, a woman quoted that 6 months after the average product is sold, only 1% of those products are still in use in some way. That basically means that if 100 Mp3 players are sold, only 1 of them is still being used by the buyer 6 months later! Guess what happens to the rest of them? They either break down, are thrown out, lost or are sitting in a drawer somewhere not being used. Can you imagine how much more MONEY we’d have if we asked ourselves: “okay, what can I buy so that 6 months from now I am still happy, still using it and I don’t need a new one?!”
And that brings us to... you guessed it... Money Tip #6:
MONEY TIP #6
Getting caught in the CONSUMER cycle is like a hamster running in a wheel. You keep going in circles and never actually get anywhere. If you want to be rich one day, learn to buy what you NEED, save your money and choose quality WANT items so that you get to use them for a long time. Remember readers, you ALWAYS have a choice and the good ones you make today will pay off for years to come ( just like your money can!).
~ Brian