Buying Stuff: What are Your Budget Busters?

The essence of marketing, is getting  you to spend your money.  You vote for a product with your dollars.  Billions of dollars are spent by companies all over the world to get  and keep your attention long enough to imprint their brand on your brain.

My job, here at the Millionaire Nurse , is to teach, cajole, berate, preach, and guide you to make better choices with your hard-earned dollars so you can learn to build your own personal wealth.  As yesterday’s post suggest’s, I also want you to learn to give, but that is another story.

What you and I fight every day, is  the huge number of choices we have to spend our money. Intersect those choices with the commercial entity that has become known as “the holidays” and we are all in trouble.

• When we have a perfectly good cell phone, why do we covet a new one?
• When our car runs great, why do we drool over the newest Mustang, Prius, or the Mini-Cooper?
• When our jeans have no holes or only designer holes, why do we have to have a new pair?
• What is it about the latest pocketbook, pocket knife, or pair of shoes that drives us into a spending frenzy?

The experts in brain function/psychology have tried to explain the chemical changes that occur in our brain that makes us feel better briefly when we buy the latest bauble, smoke that last cig., eat that chocolate, or have that third, fourth or fifth drink, but this isn’t a science blog.

So how do we combat these very real feelings of lust for stuff?

1. Planning-write down your list of needs, strike through them if they are just wants-get your partner or friend to challenge you.
2. Keep a spending limit.   Yes this means a Christmas list with dollar values by each name and don’t you dare spend more than you wrote down.  During the non-holiday season, do the same.
3. Challenge your family to give time and not money to each others favorite charity.
4. Pray for the strength to overcome your urges.   John 2:16 comes to mind:  “For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions—is not from the Father but is from the world.”

The essence of building wealth occurs when you get rid of all the bells , whistles and hype  is controlling spending and increasing income.  So do your part this holiday season.  Even if you cut your spending by 5%, you are making progress.

Let us know your thoughts on what works to help you get past those spending mantras that repeat endlessly through your mind this time of year.

If you want tips on saving money-Check out my free ebook at The Millionaire Nurse-in addition to the free e book, I will send you a mini-course on personal finance and info on credit card management and banking-free of course.

Tags: " personal finance for nurses", planned spending, saving money, saving versus spending

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at 4:18 pm and is filed under personal finance, Planned spending aka budget, Wealth building. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.