Waiting

Answer 1

How many times have you experienced buyer’s remorse? It happens to all of us. We buy something that we just think we must have and we come to regret the purchase, sometimes very soon after the purchase. Oftentimes buyer’s remorse follows in the wake of impulse purchases. When you haven’t put sufficient thought into a purchase it’s easy to end up second-guessing or regretting the purchase. To combat this effect, I recommend you institute a waiting period for large purchases. As an example of what I mean, consider this scenario. You see something you want to buy and it’s over $100. You’ve set a mandatory waiting period on items over $100 of 24 hours. So before you can buy that item, you’ve got to take 24 hours to mindfully consider whether you really want that item. Do some research and do some real thinking on the matter. Consider the reasons you want it. Is it something that’d really make your life better, or is it something you want because you’ve seen others with it and want to join the cool kids club. And the cool thing about this concept is that it’s malleable. You can institute a sliding scale for larger purchases. Say that you think a 24 hour cooling off period is sufficient for a $100 purchase, but want to scale this up to larger purchases. You could say that anything that is $250 or greater requires a 3 day waiting period and decide that any purchases that are $1,000 or more require a month-long review period before making the purchase. This is an effective technique to avoid buyer’s remorse. It als can help you cut back on clutter in your house. Most of the detritus that accumulates in our homes comes from purchases that we come to regret. If we’d given ourselves a cooling off period or waiting period to really consider these purchases we might find we have less clutter, less regret, and more satisfaction in the things we do end up purchasing.