Are you an impulse shopper?Is it a need vs want? If you buy things you didn’t set out to buy, and do so on a fairly regular basis, it’s likely that you are.
Everyone has the odd impulse purchase every now and again, but if you’re doing it all the time and using your credit cards to make purchases, then you could have a bit of a problem. It’s time to cut down, and the way to do this is to distinguish between needing something and simply wanting it.
There’s no getting away from the fact that we live in a consumer culture. People like to buy things, and shopping can give many of us a bit of a high, which is why shopping is often called ‘retail therapy’.
However, most things that we buy aren’t things that we actually need, in the true sense of really needing something, because the things we crucially need to survive are things like food, medicine, a roof over our heads etc.
To cut down your spending, you don’t need to do away with everything but the basic things you need to survive. You just need to know the difference between purchases that are useful (i.e. a warm coat in winter if you don’t have one) and purchases that are simply frivolous (i.e. a new purse when you already have a closet full of perfectly serviceable purses).
How accurate is your family’s monthly budget? Do you have false budget assumptions in your family’s monthly budget? Do you guess at certain things that you put in it? You’re not alone. A lot of people do not have the right math in their