Do you ever find yourself buying something impulsively? According to newneuromarketing.com, the average consumer spends more than $5,400 per year on impulse shopping for food, clothing, household items, and shoes.
Key Points:
- The ability to delay spending is an essential component of financial success.
- Develop your ability to delay spending by understanding the psychology behind delayed gratification.
- Define your values to lend a purpose to your delayed spending.
- Set financial goals and escape the debt trap.
- Create a budget and think intentionally about your spending habits.
Impulse shopping is closely tied to the desire for instant gratification, a natural human trait that marketers know how to exploit with exquisite skill.
Conversely, delaying a purchase is linked to delaying gratification, an acquired skill that requires maturity, foresight, and reason. If you can manage to delay gratification, you are capable of modulating your emotional and motivational impulses. That gives you a great deal of power over your life.
When you begin to perceive delayed gratification as, not a way to deprive yourself, but a way to give yourself a long-term gift, you can make real progress toward achieving control over many aspects of your life, including your finances.
How to Use Delayed Spending to Improve Your Finances
Remembering that delayed spending is the financial equivalent of delayed gratification will help you to reach your financial goals. First, it's important to understand the psychology behind delayed gratification.
Delayed gratification relates directly to self-control, discipline, and your set of personal values. Take some time to think about what your personal values are. By defining these values, you can establish a reference point for your financial efforts. When you delay gratification, you no longer decide against something. Instead, you opt for something of greater value. You invest in your future by protecting what you deem more important.
This is how it works for delayed spending: before you pull the trigger on a purchase, ask yourself some questions.
- Does it fit your value-framework?
- Does it take you any closer to your long-term goals?
- Is it something you really need?
- Will you feel good about having made this purchase tomorrow, or the next day?
If there is any doubt that this purchase does not fit into your values, postpone it. Give yourself at least 24 hours to consider it. Often, you will forget about it as soon as your remove it from your mental list of priorities.
Set Well-Defined Financial Goals
Knowing what you want from life in financial terms will help you in your efforts to delay spending. Set some goals, write them down, and commit to them. Without financial goals, you invite the need for instant gratification into your life, allowing it to dominate your finances. Goals give you direction and purpose, and they help steer you away from the temptation of impulse spending.
Create a Budget and Prioritize Saving over Spending
Your financial goals give you direction and purpose. By creating a plan to reach those goals, you can add motivation to that mix. A budget is the simplest and clearest action plan. It tells you exactly what you need to do and how you have to apply delayed spending to attain your goals.
Delayed spending does not equal indefinite delay. Saving money is a way of achieving goals, not a goal in itself. By prioritizing saving and thinking carefully before you spend, you allocate resources toward purchases and opportunities that align with your values and improve your life.
Prioritizing is the act of making the most of the resources available to you. Impulsive spending has no place in this equation.
Get Out of Debt
Make it your top priority to seek credit card help and escape debt. The cost of debt is staggering. Debt hijacks your future, defeating your financial goals and denying you any meaningful progress.
You can, however, make debt relief a worthy financial goal. Be aware that you always have credit card help options, even if you feel your situation is hopeless. Contact a ClearOne Certified Debt Specialist at 866-481-1597 to learn what your credit card relief options are and to get a personalized debt relief plan.
