Christmas is always difficult when trying to keep our budgets under control and resisting impulse shopping. Sometimes you find that perfect thing for that certain someone after you’ve already spent way too much money on your way there.
Image by: Brittany0177 via Flickr
Sound familiar? Keep these tips in mind when shopping this Christmas season - or at any time - to keep your impulses from taking over at the cash desk.
Learn to walk away
This will not only help during the Christmas season, it will help in your everyday shopping habits. If you can walk away from an item and have a think about it, you’ll be more likely to be satisfied with your purchase once you head back to the shop for your dream gift/dress/shoes. If you walk away and you forget about it or lose interest, you probably didn’t really want it anyway. (A good tip for clothes shopping: If you’re not in love with it, don’t buy it. You won’t wear it.)
Shopping online: Don’t let the website store your credit card information
While it seems like a simple task, having to dig around in your bag for your wallet to pull out your card and submit all those tiny numbers sometimes puts people off buying that online item immediately - which isn’t such a bad thing. Just like walking away in the shops, keeping an item in your online basket for a few extra hours won’t hurt. You might find you don’t want the item after all. If your credit card or debit card information is stored with the site, you can be sure that the one-simple-step shopping will add up a lot quicker than you expect.
Take Santa’s advice: make a list and check it twice
Christmas shopping is best done with a list. This way, you can keep your mind organised when you’re shopping so you don’t buy way too many items for one person, then feel like you have to match that with everyone else on the list. Make a realistic list and keep it in your hand when you’re shopping. Plus, crossing off the items as you go is also so satisfying. There’s even an app for that.
Do you have any shopping impulse control tips? We’d love to hear them. Leave them in the comments below.
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December 19, 2023
lifestyle