How to Tame the Shopping Beast
By: Christian Soschner
Tags: Life Lessons, Success, Money, Finance, Life

Financial Literacy

How to Tame the Shopping Beast

5 badass ideas that help you to stop buying unnecessary stuff

All images are from Canva Pro.

I remember the days when my apartment was filled with marketing material. My mailbox was full of this unnecessary stuff — printed booklets showing things I don’t really need. Mailbox, newspapers, eMail were overflowing with brochures — companies heavily trying to sell stuff to me.

Selling goods to me I happily can live without. Do you have friends whose house is full of things — more than they need for making a living? One of my acquaintances went to an Italian city every month to buy new suits.

A city more than 500 kilometers from his home to buy clothes no matter that he already had 50 different suits in his house. He had the habit of wearing the new suit two or three times, add it to his collection of the 50 other cases, and buy the next ones a couple of weeks later.

Today, every human being in the western world is hammered with sales messages — online and offline. Marketing experts are trained to awaken desires in us that invite us to buy more stuff. Stuff we don’t need

If we don’t watch out soon, all the money we make is spent buying goods that fill up space in our houses for no reason.

The downside of such a shopping addiction is simple: bankruptcy.

Studies show that young adults in their late teens these days already have accumulated more than 100,000 dollars in debt. And this is becoming a huge crisis.

I blame the marketing material for that — every marketing collateral feeds

the shopping beast

It awakens the desire to purchase goods and services that nobody actually needs.

It is the responsibility of the S&M personnel to sell us goods, and it is our responsibility to decide what we really need and say no to all the other offers.

How can we tame that beast?

Number One Rule

It is so easy to write down the number one rule:

If you can’t pay cash, you can’t afford it

My grandmother always said that when I wanted to borrow money from her to buy stuff. Christian, if you haven’t enough savings, you cannot buy it. You need to make money.

So I ran some errands for her and got paid. It was a valuable life lesson that I am very grateful for. Make money first; buy stuff afterward.

Don’t follow the marketing industry's narrative:

Take out a loan to buy stuff that you don’t need.

Whenever you read such a message — turn around and walk away.

The rule is so easy, and yet so many people struggle to live by it, myself included.

Here are 5 eye-opening habits I have developed to keep my shopping beast tamed.

Stop Keeping up With the Joneses.

When I was working on my master’s degree, I met some kids having wealthy parents. They drove their parent’s Mercedes, went on sailing trips every other month, and spent their holidays on the Maledives.

The most important question for them: What do your parents do for a living? Rich parents and you are in, poor parents and you are out. These were the lovely experiences of growing up in the countryside.

I neither had rich parents, nor did I have the money to keep up with those kids' lifestyles.

My grandmother’s wise words were ringing in my ears:

If you can’t pay it in cash, you can’t afford it.

It was sometimes a huge emotional effort. While my acquaintances were exchanging stories about their dream holidays, the only thing I could tell was that I learned for the next exam the entire summer holiday. And worked my a.. off to make money necessary to fund the next term at the university.

Obviously, it was more the lifestyle of the odd one out I was living, and I didn’t really fit into the rich life the others were living.

But the thing is, I just learned to accept it. Rather than going into debt and trying to fit in, I gained valuable work experience, got into some nice startup-ventures, and nailed on after the other exam.

Soon I got my master’s degree, a post-graduate well-paid job, and learned to stand on my own two feet. Whatever b/s life was throwing at me, I learned the necessary strategies to cope with it.

Many of my “rich friends” just missed the life experience train. They lived on their parent's wealth, had a great time, didn’t do exams, and once the money well dried out, they experienced an awakening.

Just do your thing and forget about other people’s opinions and habits.

Get Rid of All the Advertising Material Delivered to Your Doorstep.

I started early, throwing all this marketing material away without even reading it. When I went to my post box, the first thing I did was sorting out any of the sales stuff immediately without even reading it or looking at it.

The reason was not frugality. I just found it annoying to have to work through tons of paper to find the relevant mailings — like important information that I need for my studies.

I went to the kitchen table, put the advertisements on the left pile and letters to read on the right. The left just went into the garbage; I didn’t have the time to waste it on commercial material.

Newspapers — I canceled them all as they were full of useless marketing stuff.

Also, the marketing material was delivered to the doorstep — every day, it went directly to the garbage.

The change I quickly realized after I decided to throw all the marketing clutter out of my life:

I didn’t want to buy useless unnecessary stuff anymore.

The marketers are trained to awaken desires and wishes in human beings — desires that only can be fulfilled by buying stuff. Stuff that no human being needs to survive.

So, throw out all the unwanted direct marketing mails and live freely.

Don’t Go Grocery Shopping When You Are Hungry.

Men were hunters for a very long time. I believe the hunting gene is still passed down from one generation to the next.

Yet, hunting for survival is no longer necessary in our well-organized society, but I believe the hunting habit is still ingrained in us. Once hunger sets in, the body signals to the mind to do something.

How was life in a hunters-gatherers society? Was it easy to hunt down a deer to have food? Let’s think about winter, no fresh fruits around, and also the veggie season was over.

The only food available was hunting down animals. But in winter… I believe it might have been challenging at times. My interpretation of why the body signals very early hunger — the signal that reminds us of sudden death due to starvation, even when a death through starvation is still weeks away, thanks to the endless amount of body fat stored in many of us westerners.

The survival instinct sets in, and people got going to get food quickly. In a scarce environment like the Nordics, it might have well been that it takes a couple of days until fresh food is available.

No wonder that the body's signals start way before it is low on energy and close to a critical condition. A starving body stops functioning properly after one to two weeks of starvation.

And a functioning body and mind are necessary to complete the hunting process properly.

At least this is the narrative I have put together to excuses one of my bad habits:

When I go shopping hungry I come home with sufficient food to prepare a feast for 40 people.

Of course, it is exaggerated, well, at least a bit. What I realized, when I go grocery shopping hungry, I buy more than I usually need.

Two tricks I developed:

Eat before you go to the modern shopping hunt.

Make a shopping list.

Impulse Control With Shopping Lists

I love my iPhone. I love my iPad. I love my Airpods: the Airpods one and two and pro.

Well, I have bought some decent tech stuff throughout my life. As I am online, I cannot avoid getting commercials, silently sneaked into my unconscious awareness.

All the physical stuff is blocked, but lately, the marketing gurus learned to sneak sales via influencers. Did you ever read sudden product reviews that end up with affiliate marketing links written by your most admired influencers?

That is marketing in 2020. Companies and politicians use the community leaders to get their messages across. It is good at times.

Such strategies lead to certain shopping impulses.

Read the article by Admired Influencer 1

Click on the link

it directs you directly to the checkout

The credit card data is already sucked from another account and filled in

You need another click, and you got the purchase contract nailed, sealed, and done

Yes, I am human too. And I do have these sudden shopping cravings and impulses pop up after being motivated to get stuff.

Useless stuff. Unwanted, unnecessary stuff.

Why should I need 3 more smartphones?

Or buy a new smartphone every 12 months? When is the other one doing a great job still?

How to deal with it?

I created a shopping list to function in between the impulse and the check out button.

Instead of checking out, I put the desired item on a special “desire list.”

And this is what it is; the externally induces shopping desires end up on a list.

Getting the List Cleared on Special Days

I remember those two special days well when my family drove to the big city 100 kilometers away from my home town.

We did it twice—one before the Easter weekend and the second time in fall before Christmas.

Us kids got the permission to get one wish fulfilled. One wish only. My relatives trained us to think carefully about what it is that is voiced out.

Once it was said, it couldn’t be taken back and was fulfilled.

I kept this habit all my life. Once in a while, I look at my wish list from the previous chapter and run through it.

What on this list is something that really has a positive impact on my life. I go through the list and envision what change it brings. I ask myself a few questions:

Do I really need suit number 25 to improve my life in the coming 3 months?

Is the new iPhone really a proper replacement for my old one?

Do I really need this new awesome laptop, or is my old one still doing the job?

Should I buy the Tesla right now? Or wait another year.

I have my special shopping days, and I grant myself the generosity of getting one item from the list. Just one.

So I have to think carefully, what item it is.