#62 Wishlist and Never Impulse Purchase

This decision alone will save you hundreds or thousands of dollars a year and possibly over a million dollars in your lifetime.  Retailers and marketers exploit people with a tendency toward instant gratification.  There are two things you can do that have been proven by many to be successful in counteracting this impulse buying.  

First, just walk away.  Part of your brain may scream, "...but it's on special and there are only two of those left!" It's ok, it's not the end of the world.  Trust us on this.  There is a good chance they still have a few dozens of those items in the backroom or coming next month.  You only saw two because that's a marketing strategy.  Do you think a company will stop selling their best-selling items?  No way.  We have gone many times to Dillards or Kohl's and found there was only one item left and we walked away only to return a week or a month later looking at a stack of 10-20+ of the same exact items.  Cars are the same way.  They will do their best to make you buy that day but guess what, automakers make gazillions cars a year.  You can always get it from a different dealer if one dealer runs out of the model you like.  

So, just walk away and you may write that item in your notepad.  Ask yourself one week later at home, not at the store, if you still want that item.  By this time 50-75% of the things you saw at the store no longer pique your interest.  If you wait a month or two, there is a good chance you have totally forgotten about it.  That's when you know you're a conqueror!  We waited over two years to purchase one of our vehicles.  Those two years were filled with dozens of visits to various dealers in the area, online shopping, reading reviews from other customers, adding and removing various types of vehicles to our top five list.  Finally when we got it, it was a great experience, and we don't have any buyer's remorse.

Second, keep a wishlist.  We have one with Amazon.com.  It's free.  We created a public list so others can see things we'd want as a gift (i.e. Christmas, etc.), and we also created another list of things that are kept under Private WishList.  There are hundreds of items there from months and years worth of online browsing and wishing.  If there is a book you'd really like, a movie, a car, a gadget, anything you'd like to get, put it on the wishlist and do the same strategy as the first one: wait.   Learn to defeat instant gratification.  The nice part about it is that a month or a year down the road you will actually thank the wishlist and pat yourself in the back for not buying over half of the things on that list.  You may even wonder as you browse down that list, "why in the world would I buy that book (or item)?"  Cha-ching!  You have just saved yourself several hundred dollars by not buying things you don't really need.

Never do things based on emotion.  That's what retail stores exploit, online "healer" preacher asks for donation, As Seen on TV sells ("but wait...if you order now, not only you will get this...."), and car salespersons take advantage of untrained consumers.