Posted by The Problem
A problem I, and a lot of other people, have when saving money is impulse buying. Sometimes when I feel stressed or overwhelmed by work or life, I go to Amazon and start browsing random stuff. More often than I’d like to admit, I end up buying things I don’t really need and barely use. I buy them just to feel the dopamine shot in the moment I click “Place Order.” To avoid running into this again I developed what I call The 3 Items Wish List.
I also had around ten wish lists with super random stuff. That made me not use the wish lists at all, because they were filled with trash I never had money for. The important stuff got lost in the chaos. Some of the items I had in my wish lists were:
- An EcoSphere – It looks cool. It was really one of the first things I added back when I started to use Amazon. For those of you who don’t know, that’s a complete aquatic ecosystem contained in a closed crystal sphere.
- Two Tactical Flashlights – Why have one when you can buy two.
- The complete collection of Game of Thrones Funko Pop figures – That was like 15 figures for me. I like Game of Thrones, Funko Pop look cool, don’t think I need to say anything else.
- A bow, arrows, arm guard – Guess I wanted to be an archer at some point in life.
- Video games – Of course I’d have these. Every video game I thought of playing was on a wish list. I even had different lists for each console. There were like 20 different games I wasn’t going to buy.
- Clothing – Yes, I need something to wear, but most of it wasn’t even available anymore.
- Car parts – I thought I could fix my car on my own. I mean, I can, I just won’t use my time for it.
You probably get the idea.
The Inspiration
In the last few months, I started working on improving my life in several aspects and money is one of them. In this process I have been watching lots of videos on YouTube about topics that I think will help me. There are two ideas that got me thinking about this experiment.
The first idea is minimalism, as exposed by Matt D’Avella in his YouTube channel and his Netflix documentary about The Minimalists. The idea they expose is that minimalism is about reducing clutter and focusing on what really matters. What is it that you really want to do? Does what you have around you get you closer to that? The things you have in your house, the things you buy. We tend to buy and accumulate a lot of unnecessary trash just because we felt good buying or because some day we might need it.
The second one came from Stephan Graham, a YouTuber that talks about money, investing, saving and the sort. In one of his videos he talks about different ways of saving money, One of those ways is postponing your buys to avoid impulse buying. The idea behind this is that most of the satisfaction really comes from looking for the item you want to buy – window shopping, which I don’t like to do physically, but do a lot on Amazon. If you look for the item, save it in your cart or a list and wait a few days, or even a week, before actually buying it, most times, you won’t. If it is something you really need, you will buy it anyway.
The Solution – The 3 Items Wish List
First, remove all the clutter from the lists. I removed all the Funko Pops, archery gear and the EcoSphere. Some lists I didn’t even filter, just deleted them completely. Delete all the lists but one.
Second, reduce the last list to only three items. Which items? Whatever items you feel you really want to buy, but just three. Choose by any criteria that works for you and pick your three items. Those items have to be ordered by priority, the one you want the most must be at the top.
When you have the three items left on the list, set a monthly budget. In my case I set a flexible budget with two limits. The first soft limit is 50 US dollars and the second hard limit is 100. Every month I’ll try to spend around 50 dollars. It might get to 60 or even 80. But definitely never over 100.
After you have all this set up, start using it. Every month you can buy what you have on top of the list, which is supposed to be the thing you want the most or the one you really need. You can window shop and modify the list as much as you want, whenever you want. But, by limiting the number of items in the list, you will have to choose between this new item and what is already on the list. After changing the list, I recommend letting it sit at least a couple days before making a purchase.
What does my list look like now? Well…
It has just two items because I just bought what I had on top and haven’t added anything else).
With a method like this one, I can stop spending money on impulse buying and only get what I really want. Whenever I think of buying something on Amazon I go and check the list. Since it’s only three items I have a clear look and choose if I want to move something out or forget about what I was looking for.