BUYING MORE THAN YOU NEED

One of the horrors of cleaning out the refrigerator is to find perishables, well past their expiry dates, turning an unappealing shade, releasing an odour or being covered with mould.  There could also be food that had not been stored properly so bacteria had spoilt them.

Besides the refrigerator, cleaning out the kitchen cabinet would be another nightmare.  I wonder how many of us have left canned food or ready-to-cook sachets standing on the shelf for months until they are way past their best before dates. I could safely say that most of us would have been in that situation at least once in our lifetime.

Consumed with guilt, we throw the sorry sight into the bin.

With recession and unemployment hitting the streets of Ireland, many are cutting back on expenses. Strangely enough there is still much wastage of food. Irish consumers throw out 30 per cent of food bought in supermarkets, costing each household more than €1,000 a year.

This is certainly bad for the environment. Ethically wasting food while others who are less fortunate go hungry is frowned upon. Yet, why do we continue this unhealthy habit of buying more than we need?

Reasons range from a lack of planning, buying on impulse or not eating leftovers.

Whatever the reason, solutions for this unhealthy trend include buying and keeping ‘just enough’, using a FIFO (‘first in, first out’) method to control our purchases and being wary of sales gimmicks like ‘2 for 1’ or ‘Buy 1, get 1 at half price’.

I have nothing against genuine money savers especially if they are necessities, for example, shampoo or toilet paper. However if they are offers for buying perishables in bulk, then I would certainly pause and do a mental evaluation before purchasing.

Diet gurus claim there is more to overbuying that meets the eye.

A person low in self worth seeks solace in ‘compensatory consumption’. Overbuying ‘fills’ the person up so she will not feel so personally depleted.

The bad news is, overbuying is not restricted solely to the food department. We may also have rows and rows of shoes, many of them worn only once or not even worn at all. We also have cupboards full of clothes. If we are honest enough, there are some clothes in the cupboard that we have not worn for a long time and probably never will. There are also those beautiful dresses that are one size smaller because fashion magazines tell us to purchase them as an incentive for keeping to our latest diet.

The difficult part is to actually take the clothes off their hangers and the shoes off the shelves. We know we must pack them into boxes and give them away but because we have formed some kind of an intricate bonding with them, we tell ourselves we will do it and then put it off to another day.

So how can we put the brakes on shopping for wants and not needs?

A good tactic is delayed buying. This means that when you see something that we like and are inextricably drawn to it, just leave the shop without buying it and tell yourself to come back another day if you really want it. Most times the desire to purchase it would have worn off after a few days – the very same dress that you thought you must buy. The delaying tactic is also economical because usually in-season clothes are highly priced   only to be discounted after a few weeks.

Another interesting method to curb overbuying is something that I learnt from a fellow blogger. She started one ‘non-spending’ day in a week where she would refuse to part with her dollars and cents for that particular day however great the temptation was to make a purchase. She was surprised that in no time this kind of imposed restraint had become an ‘automatic checker’ whenever she wanted to purchase something. Soon it was a breeze to stretch the non-spending day to more than one day.

Finally the old fashioned method of paying things by cash certainly helps. If we go shopping with only cash in our bags and leave our credit cards behind, we would certainly have to buy within our means. Not only that,  we would make a mental assessment of the things we intend to buy….necessities above wants.

Source: http://www.nst.com.my/opinion/columnist/bad-habit-of-buying-more-than-you-need-1.310191?cache=03%253Fkey%253DKuala+Lumpur%252F7.196217%253Fpage%253D0%252F7.213537%253Fkey%253DKuala+Lumpur