It is a lot easier to spend money than it is to make money. People who don’t have a lot of money spend it with the greatest of ease. They fly through their income long before the end of the pay period without a plan for replenishing the account. The people in the most need of a strict budget are usually the people least likely to have one. If you find this describes you, the thing you should know is that you are not alone, not by a long shot.
The other thing to know is that it doesn’t have to be that way. There are things you can do to spend your money more judiciously. The answer is not to stop spending money altogether. That would be both impractical and impossible. We all have bills to pay and groceries to buy. It is a matter of how you spend your money. More to the point, it is about your methodology for determining if a purchase is or is not a good idea. Without a methodology, you will waste money on every purchase you make. Here are the factors that can make all the difference.
Go for Quality over Price
When money is tight, you feel compelled to purchase the cheapest option you can find. But that is almost always a mistake. You don’t really want to ever buy cheap cosmetics for any number of good reasons. Instead of focusing on the price, try reading the label and doing a little research. You can get an idea of how reliable the claims are by making sure the cosmetic testing was the highest quality.
If you would rather waste your money, just buy the brand that was advertised on an infomercial with lots of testimonials from actors who got paid for their ability to convince you they are average people you should trust. Hint: Anyone working that hard to get you to trust them should probably not be trusted.
What you should trust are testable claims. There will always be new con artists of cosmetics. They play on your insecurity or envy. You find yourself listening to their testimonial and forget to check the claims they are making. If there is not a lot of quality testing, there is no reason for you to waste your money. Save it for the quality product.
Don’t Fall for Celebrity Endorsements
You should be suspicious of a company that spends boatloads of money for a celebrity endorsement. That means they are overcompensating for something. That something is usually the fact that the product they are hawking is garbage. If not garbage, it is not as good as the competing product in the category. It is easier and cheaper to pay a celebrity than it is to do the hard work of researching, developing, building, and distributing a quality product.
Some of those celebrity picks are all about nostalgia. Those are worse than usual because they are generally targeting an older and more vulnerable audience. They are duping seniors into choosing the medical plan endorsed by their favorite actor or athlete from 40 years ago. Ahhh… Those were the days. What the company is saying is that you can trust them because this beloved celebrity would never lie to you. Once the celebrity starts talking, you should take a note of that product as one not to buy.
Don’t Buy for a Future Benefit
Some things have to be bought in advance such as funeral services. You really can’t shop for that one after the fact. But in general, you never want to buy a product based on the promise of what it will do for you in the future. A lot of people recently purchased an M1-powered iPad Pro thinking that Apple would make some groundbreaking changes in the software that would employ that excessive power. Another WWDC has come and gone where they failed to address that segment of the market. Many are left disappointed over what Apple didn’t do with the OS. They spent a lot of money banking on some software update that didn’t come. Don’t be that person. Buy products for what they can do for you right now.
Wasting money is easy. All you have to do is buy products that have not been properly tested, that are a part of celebrity endorsement scams, and that were purchased for a future benefit that was never promised.