I'm sure most of you here are already aware of what I am about to inform you through this post. If nothing else, let this post serve as a friendly nudge on our common mission towards frugality.
I was analyzing my purchase behavior yesterday by looking through my amazon purchases for the past 5 years. I found out that about 30% of the total amount of money I spent was wasted in products which value of utility fall below their costs, and not just in terms of money, but also space, time, and mental costs (regret and frustration).
Some common patterns of poor purchase decisions are:
-
Incongruence between quality and level of use. Underbuying is as bad as overbuying in many cases. I've made the mistake of being frugal just for the sake of frugality, cheaping out on purchases for things that I have a deep level of use (like computers) when I could have gotten better value (hence satisfaction) with a more expensive option. The opposite is also true for me, particularly, about facial care products, coffee containers, and small exercise accessories.
-
The need for non-functional variety. One notable example: buying the same shirt in different, excessive, varieties of color and cut. As you age, you tend to gravitate toward simpler designs and neutral colors. The same goes to furniture. What happens is that down the road of ownership, you'd just end up wearing/ using more of the simpler cuts.
-
Purchase quantity and ownership/usage experience. Especially health supplements, coffee beans and snack foods. There's usually a better bargain to buy them in bulk, but only if you've tried them before and liked it, otherwise, no amount of discount is worth it. They could offer you at 1/10 the price, but if you don't use them, you lose 100% of what you've paid for. Start small.
-
Buying instead of renting or borrowing. Textbooks, camping gear (if you not an avid camper), and specialized tools comes to mind. When something is expensive, takes up storage space, and are only temporarily or circumstantially (rare occasions) useful to you, rent don't buy.
-
Focusing too much on top reviews. Barring from fake reviews, even if you focus too much on real top reviews, you could be committing to bad conduct. Top reviewers are often advanced users of a given product. Especially for special tools, sex toys and books, they can maximize the utility of a given product the way you never will, their tastes are likely to be too esoteric for your liking. Reviews should be read broadly across all levels of users.
-
An illogical dispreference for the old and affinity towards that of which is new. It's not illogical per say, it's human to favor new things over older things, an instinct which I believe evolved back in the days when things don't last the way they do now. Especially small tech items, phones and electronics. Properly used, they can usually last far longer than you think. When you buy new ones without the option to trade in the old ones, and said old ones are still too functional for you to stomach the prospect of just throwing it away, you'll end up with an extra that you don't need and have to care for, it gets frustrating. Before you switch, look up the average lifespan of a given item, if they've crossed the average limit, you'd feel better about donating it away, recycling it and getting a new one.
-
Disregard for minimalism. if you have no experience, exhausted your research and found no reliable way for you to generalize the experience of others onto your own subjective preferences and needs, a good purchase philosophy is to always lean toward minimalism. In terms of price, size, design, color, and function. The greater the uncertainty, the more essential is optionality, and in the context of material possessions, minimalism often affords more optionality, in terms of versatility or even disposability.
January 10, 2021 at 10:31PM
