How To Spend Less Money

There is actually an easy way to help yourself to spend less, and that is to actually increase your price sensitivity.

Think of it this way… When was the last time you said, “Wow, that’s too expensive. I’ll never pay for that!”?

Now try and keep that experience in your head as we talk about price sensitivity.

Price sensitivity is actually an economic term that helps us to understand when a customer thinks something is expensive, a good buy, or cheap.

Each of those terms carry heavy connotations to them, but let’s dig a little further.

What does expensive mean to you? If you label something “expensive” do you usually buy it or not buy it?

For instance, a flat screen tv may be labeled expensive, but you still make the purchase. And that iPad you’ve been checking out for months is also expensive, but you don’t buy it.

So think first about this. If you label something expensive do you always buy it, sometimes buy it, or never buy it? Get that answer in your head before we move on.

Now let’s skip to something we would label “cheap”.

Same concept, do you buy the “cheap” shoes because they are cheap? Or do you not buy them because they are “cheap”? It is important to figure this answer out in your head before moving on.

A “cheap” product may or may not be a “good” product. And a “good” product is usually not the “best” product. So how do you make up your mind about what is a good product and what isn’t?

In a perfect world, we would all get the best product at the best price because we have taken the time to research all the options and purchase the best thing to suit our needs or wants.

Which reminds me of a whole other rabbit trail… How well are you able to distinguish between your needs and wants?! But I digress…

So how often do you take the time to distinguish what a “good buy” might look like? Often? Hardly Ever? Never? And how much is your time “worth” to you?

I am putting things in quotation marks because they are all words that we have to assign a “value” to. In other words, different people put different values on them, and they therefore mean different things.

Cheap to you is not cheap to me. Expensive to you is not expensive to me. A good buy for you may be an utterly ridiculous buy for me!

So how does all this help me to SPEND LESS?

I’ll show you, but did you get the answers to the questions above in your head? Here they are again fresh…

How often do you buy something that is “expensive”?
How often do you buy something that is “cheap”?
How often do you buy something that is “a good buy”?

At the risk of making the above sound like a trick question I have to ask you, “How often do you choose NOT to buy?”

And now I ask you, “How often do you even ask any of these questions to yourself”?

You see, the key to spending less, is to insert a pause button at that crucial moment when you are making a buying decision…

Allow yourself to ask some of the above questions. And then ask yourself “Do I need to buy this at all…”

Ask yourself if buying cheap will be more expensive in the long run…

Ask yourself if the expensive item is really worth it in the short run, or at all…

Ask yourself if the “great buy” of the moment is actually not the best buy specifically for you…

Ask yourself if you need to buy that thing at all…

Just inserting that pause button, and asking yourself some critical questions, at the moment you are deciding to buy, can help you save a fortune!

How do you spend less money?

Hit that pause button my friends… 🙂