Resisting temptation is the most expensive enemy you must fight within yourself. When you resist temptation, you can pay off debt faster, save more money, and generate more investment income. The world is full of people who just wants money from you, nothing else.
Resisting temptation to save more money is a crucial step to take if you want to be rich. One of the easiest and best way to win is to avoid losing, instead of consistently winning over the long term. Every dollar that you spend is one unit of freedom that goes out the door.
The more you spend, the more you are losing. The exception is when you buy products, services, and goods that are making you more money. These are assets that you should spend on. However, the vast majority of people spend money on depreciating assets, instead of appreciating assets.
I had no idea until reading personal finance blogs that marketers were using clever psychological tricks to get me to spend more money. I didn’t even know that I was being tempted until I started taking note of my spending habits.
Marketers are phenomenal at convincing you that you need the product, even when the actual reason is you want the product.
Corporations spend billions of dollars on researching consumer behaviors and psychological biases and tendencies. They then exploit those for their own gain. All they care about is increasing their bottom line. One easy way they’ve used these biases against customers is by using the scarcity bias.
Anybody who’s spent thousands of dollars on Beanie Babies know exactly what the scarcity bias can do to people. It probably costs like $5 to manufacture a single Beanie Baby but these sold for $1,000’s of dollars. The temptations are working.
What Resisting Temptation Means and What It Doesn’t
This isn’t about religious temptations to avoid. This is about resisting temptation that betters your personal finance and money situation. I’m not here to argue against gluttony or the seven sins. I’m here to argue against temptations to buy more than you need by believing the marketing tricks and tactics company regularly employ.
One thing is clear, resisting temptation allows you to live a life on your terms. Influence is a subtle thing. Most of the time, people don’t even realize that they are being influenced. They believe they came up with the idea on their own. However, looking from a big picture perspective, the influenced people aren’t making the decisions themselves.
Rather, they’re letting others make the decisions for them. The beautiful part about this is that the victim rarely knows it’s happening to them. Companies have done a thorough job of researching how the unconscious and subconscious mind works.
Your conscious mind aren’t always the drivers of your decisions. It’s usually your unconscious and subconscious mind that are.
The marketing rule of 7 is prevalent today. Businesses try their absolute hardest to expose you at least seven times because that’s when you will finally start to make a purchase from them. The short 2-minute video below outlines some of the clever ways advertisers use to brainwash and tempt you to buy their products and goods.
When resisting temptation, remember to not resist DESTROYING that social share button in the right to your favorite social media! It’s for Google’s algorithm and it helps out this blog a ton and your friends a ton as well by bettering their personal finance life. Let’s share the knowledge for everyone to win out against advertisers in the end.
Resisting Temptation on These Three Things
The 3 below items are a good start to resist temptation on. There are many more to list but the list below is a good start to practice resisting temptation on and will set you up for long term success.
1) Resisting Temptation on Excess Food
Evaluate how often you throw out food. When I was little, my parents would buy $200 worth of groceries every two weeks. $50 – $75 of that would be thrown away by the end of the two weeks. Things would start rotting and meal plans always changed at the last minute.
Actually become good at planning meals to near perfect accuracy. A 96% accuracy is good enough, while 100% is obviously the best path to end up in. You don’t need to cook different things every single day for the rest of the year. You just need to cook different things once in a while.
One big tip is to never go to the grocery store when you are hungry. It’s just not smart. I’ve made that mistake so many times and associated grocery stores with restaurants and started “ordering” more food than I knew I needed. I estimate I spent thousands more dollars on food waste like these.
Most of the food just made me gain weight, in which I had to burn off eventually anyway.
2) Resisting Temptation on Things for the Sake of Buying
Resisting temptation on things such as decorations, holiday seasonal purchases, and little things are the biggest items to cut out. One of my friends owns a collection of magic puzzles that he thought was cool and intellectually stimulating. The only times he uses it is when new guests come over and they ask about it.
After you figure out the answer to the puzzle, there’s really no more use for it. Things such as seasonal purchases aren’t smart either. I don’t own any costumes that I used for Halloween and don’t own any Christmas or Easter decorations.
There’s really no practical and functional use for these. It would end up in landfill at the end of the day, anyway. These aren’t durable goods that give you consistent value. They are durable goods that give you a one-time value, which are things that you shouldn’t buy again.
That’s not a good reason to dish out money for.
3) Resisting Temptation on “Guru Advice“
Resisting temptation on “guru advice” is one of the best things you can avoid in your entire life. These days, there are zero secrets to anything, really. You don’t need to spend dollars on a “personal finance bootcamp course that will propel you forward to leaps and bounds like no one has ever seen.” If you really want great advice, you can buy a $10 book.
Better yet, you can get one from your local library if they have it in stock for free. Too many people are bought by the guru advice marketing because they want a shortcut. They want the next best stock pick that will make them billions of dollars. That’s the problem with wanting to be smart and taking the easy way out.
Taking the easy way out is fine, but only if it’s done in the correct way. The ones offering you the easy way out for money is never the right way to go about it. The best advice that I’ve received were all free. When I sued a company, I received free help from the court clerks that were working in the courthouse. I won my lawsuit with their help.
The best advice is almost always free.
Five Key Ways to Resist Temptation
Since you’re convinced that resisting temptation is the way to go, here are the actual steps you can take to do so. I want you to make decisions because you wanted to, not because someone else wanted you to.
1) Recognition, Recognition, Recognition
The first step is applying conscious effort to recognize when you are being manipulated, influenced, and tempted. Clever retail marketing seduces even the best of us once in a while. It’s near impossible to recognize when that is happening, either.
However, without this crucial step, the game is over before it even starts. A good rule of thumb is to practice recognition ANY time that you are transferring money from your hands to someone else’s. That gets you started in recognizing key things on any purchasing decisions you make.
Then as you get better at it, you can start to filter out on some decisions that you automatically already know that you have to make a purchase for. It takes some time but adds a lot of value to your wallet.
Getting good at resisting temptation is hard, and the first step of recognition is arguably the hardest. Once you master this step, then you can move on to the next one.
2) Understand the Functional Benefits, Not the Aesthetics
A key part to resisting temptation is to understand the functional benefits of the products you are buying. Are you really buying for the look and appeal of it? Consumers actually buy a product because of the packaging of it, not because of the product itself.
The visual appeal of things matter more to us than we know. A popular saying is “I’ll believe it when I see it”. A modified form is “I’ll buy it when I see how good it is”. Great packaging creates a psychological trigger in your brain that entices you. Microsoft Word products come in a large box with a single 1 CD inside. 95% of the box is full of air.
By making the box larger than it is, it makes customers feel that they are getting a great deal. Not just a flimsy piece of software on a CD that feels like it can easily be downloaded from the internet. Actually understand the functional benefits of the product, not just the packaging and visual appeal.
3) Evaluate How Often You Will Use It
If you foresee that you will use the product daily, weekly, or even monthly, it’s a smart decision to purchase it. Don’t be purchase things like my friend above who only uses the magic puzzles once a quarter, if that, when he has new guests over. Consider buying in bulk if you foresee using it daily.
I always buy peanut butter to the largest size because I eat it daily and throw none of it away. Same goes for things like toothpaste, water, pens, sticky notes, and the like. A 10% discount in a single day is worth more than a 10% increase in the stock market. There are no taxes to pay.
If you are not going to use the product consistently, then it’s time to practice resisting temptation and put it right back on the shelf.
4) Stick to a List
Grocery lists exist for a reason. There’s a reason why you wrote up the essential things you need to buy in the first place. You wrote it in an environment where you are the winner. Your own home. There are no outside influences tempting you to spend more money.
You did NOT write it at the grocery store where they use constant tricks to get you to spend more money.
Instead of fighting a battle in the opponent’s turf, fight the battle in your own turf. Without a set list that dictate what you can and can’t buy, you are playing the game on their terms. Not yours. Most people are fine and fully accept this fact, which is fine.
However, if you want a more level or winning playing field, it’s time to religiously stick to your grocery or purchasing list.
5) Practice Often
It’s not easy to actually think of these steps when you’re making a snap decision. That’s how companies get you. They understand people aren’t fully trained to actually think through decisions when making a purchasing decision. Most of us make decisions based on the fast thinking portion of our brain.
They take 2 seconds to look at it, think if it’s fine for their life, and then grab it to their shopping cart to check out. They use this against us by inserting colorful visuals and eye popping decorations around the product to get us.
That’s why you need to practice resisting temptations by asking the questions above over and over again to gain comfort.
You don’t want to make decisions at the snap of your fingers. You want to actually think things through before making a decision. Most people don’t read the terms and conditions of a website. People have actually given up their first born as payment for a fake social networking website as part of their terms and conditions.
This is what companies do to take advantage of you. I’m certainly guilty of it as well and started reading it more once I started to understand that legal language is important. If I find a clause that I don’t agree with, I practice resisting temptation and refuse to sign up for their service.
Resisting Temptation Gives You Control
In life, just as the little things are what matters the most, it’s the little things that can sink and bury you. It’s five dollars today, ten dollars next week, until it’s $1,000’s of dollars over a year. One year is a long time to accumulate good or bad habits.
I never fully grasped how important time was until I started tracking what I can achieve in a year.
A one day diet doesn’t make a difference in my life but a 3 month diet does. We have a short-term bias where we want to see results today and we want to see results quickly. The things that matter doesn’t show results until way later.
That is why resisting temptation is a good way for you to win over the long term. It is rare that people lose in a big way over the long term. What actually happens it that people lose in a “leaky bucket” way where small drips of water are poured out of their bucket.
By the time they realize what happened, all of their water is gone. It’s already too late.
Therefore, resisting temptation gives you the control over how much leakage and spillage you want in your life. You are the captain of your ship when you avoid influences, not someone else. Control your own decisions instead of letting others control them.
Do you really need that Jack-O-Lantern or is it because the corporate holiday is pressuring you to think you do? If after consideration you decide you want it for yourself, then you can go for it. Not before you actually take the time to think through your actions first, though.
Resisting temptation is a wonderful way for you to take charge and control of your life and fatten your wallet even further.
Important topic to address, as I think the lack of this ability is what lands a lot of people in debt! There is certainly a place for planned splurges and spending on the things you value, and in fact, we regularly budget for them. However, being able to resist temptation for impulse buys and to identify when you’re being actively marketed to, is key in being able to achieve financial freedom. Nice points here.
Absolutely. Companies, especially Starbucks, know how hard resisting temptation is for people so they have clever product placements around the cashier area to tempt people even further. When you control yourself and resist the temptation instead of having someone else control your decisions for you, that’s when you are doing something right.
Good Points! I think once you have a budget, and you start to see your debt decline, and your savings/investing grow, the urge to give into consumerism starts to die off organically. I have never been a heavy consumer, but these days I am so focused on Financial Independence that it has become extremely easy to disregard anything that I don’t necessarily need. My mind goes straight to “..yeah but that’s $20 in my index fund.” Now, that’s not to say I don’t enjoy my Starbucks coffee and other luxuries, but the ones I do enjoy are all factored into my budget so I never have to feel guilty about them.
Thanks Chad! Consumerism truly is the enemy. For some reason, we think that’s the way to feel good about ourselves. We don’t really need a lot of things to be happy, let alone survive.
That $20 doesn’t sound like a lot of money until you realize it compounds into hundreds of dollars later down the road. Resisting temptation is about resisting some temptation but it definitely isn’t about resisting all of them. You are making the right choices!