Top Tip to Stop Overspending on Online Purchases

So, I know everyone has their own personal preference and favorite tips to stop overspending. To each their own, I’m sure many are highly effective and others are less effective based on your spending habits and personality. But there is one tip that has personally helped me reduce spending in the face of needless online shopping. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that I had a bad problem with overspending but I definitely had bouts of buying needless things just for the sake of buying them, as has any consumer in the 21st century. I’m sure we’ve all fallen victim to this at some point in our lives but sometimes we just get distracted by our emotions and pulled away from what we are supposed to be doing towards an online sale or a special holiday promotion or something that is a “want” not a “need”.

Everyone loves to save money and for good reason, saving money is a positive thing and gives a really rewarding feeling to consumers. However, there comes a point where the lines of spending too much money and saving a lot of money can get blurry. We don’t need to spend in excess in order to save a lot of money and we don’t need to make excessive purchases in order to save a lot of money. These two things don’t need to be highly correlated.

So here it goes.

My Top and Foremost Tip to Stop Overspending: Wait to Make Purchases

In order to stop overspending, you need to WAIT and have patience. Being patient can be easier said than done but hear me out, if you just save your cart for 30 minutes and take up another task or activity before checking out on that purchase, you will be a lot less likely to complete the purchase. The odds are if you wait on the purchase, even if it’s just 30 minutes, you’ll be less likely to forget about what you were planning to buy and when you come back to it, you might not be so keen on making that purchase anymore. Our emotions and impulses are really great at playing tricks on us. A good way to gauge whether our purchase is fueled by our impulses is to wait. When we wait are emotional state becomes more relaxed and calm. When we are less fueled by emotions, we can let our rational mind do the majority of the decision making, which is exactly what we want.

This tactic is used by many and is one of the main reasons I was personally able to cut down on many purchases. I just found myself buying less stuff, if I gave the purchase some extra added time. In many cases, just waiting alone will help you differentiate between an indecisive purchase and an impulsive purchase.

Waiting to buy is a real tactic that will help you spend less and help you keep in line with your budget! Waiting puts time in between purchases so the benefits are actually two-fold. Adding time in between purchases means that you are spending less on an annual basis (literally) but it also has the added psychological benefit of making you think twice about any purchases you make. As a consumer, I can be quite indecisive at times, so adding more time will often make me more inclined to re-consider many impulses buys I would’ve otherwise made. Taking a second look at your shopping cart a day later or even an hour later can be quite eye opening and can really help take the emotions out of your purchase since the allure of “buying something new” can really tend to disappear after that time frame. It’s also why the goal of many ecommerce platforms/website is to always have as low an abandonment rate on shopping carts as possible. When consumers close out the webpage and abandon their shopping carts the odds are they are lot less likely to return. This is also the one time that being indecisive can actually be highly beneficial!

The Waiting Game

It’s important to note that you don’t have to do this for any purchase you consider a necessity or that you place in the “need” category. As you build this habit of practicing patience, you can try to gamify your experience by creating a sort of waiting game. For each purchase you wish to make try your best to keep track of your waiting periods. For example, if it’s your first time trying this process, try to put 1 hour in between the time you purchase the item. After a few instances of playing this game you can than increase it to a few hours. From a few hours you can try to increase it to a day and from a day you can try to increase it to a few days. What you’ll actually be doing is be putting “time in between your expenses/purchases”, so your money will last longer. Eventually what will end up happening is that you will wind up forgetting about the purchases you wanted to make in their entirety.

Eventually as you forget to checkout on your shopping carts you will naturally build more conservative spending habits. Overtime you’ll be less inclined to spend like you used to and will naturally do less shopping. Although this might sound like a simple and easy tip, it’s one that is sure to have a lasting impact if practiced overtime.