Two Questions Before You Buy

Photo By Mike Petrucci

I saw a lot of good deals over the Thanksgiving weekend and there are still plenty around. I did buy a couple of things but I managed to resist some other bargains by asking myself two questions:

1. Do I REALLY need that?
2. Where the heck am I going to put it?

Ask yourself these things before you before you pull out your credit card and really think about them. Visualize your house and all the stuff in it. Do you see any free space to put what you’re about to buy? How did you get by this far without it?

It’s one thing if you’re replacing something you already have and you’re looking to upgrade, but even then, maybe you should see how much longer you can get by with the one you have? Also, are you really willing to part with the old one?

One of the items I did buy was a new wireless router for my house. My current one is several years old but still functions. However, we’ve noticed that some of our devices will lose connectivity throughout the day. I also wanted something with more parental controls than my current one provides now that my kids are getting older and have their own tablets. When I get the new one, I’ll reset the old one to factory settings and then either donate it or see if any of my friends need it.

Before I bought the router, I asked myself both of the questions above and decided I really needed the more advanced parental controls and I have a place to put it, right where the old one is. Done.

There have been times I wish I would have pondered those questions a little more. I think it was shortly after our bread machine broke that I found a great deal on an ice cream maker. I thought the kids would love it and we would use it quite a bit in the summer. I had a place to put it since we discarded the broken bread machine.

Unfortunately, we don’t use the ice cream maker that much. You can’t make a very big batch of ice cream at once and after you use it, you have to wash the tub by hand. Then you place it in the freezer (level so that it doesn’t freeze at an angle) and wait for it to freeze again before you can use it again. Not to mention, you have to have the ingredients on hand to make ice cream. The biggest problem is that my wife misses the bread machine and now the ice cream maker is taking up space where we used to store it.

In the end, these are petty problems that we’ll ultimately resolve by getting rid of something that we don’t use much and we all know things like bread machines and ice cream makers are luxuries in a world where some people don’t know where they are staying the night or where their next meal may come from.

The point is in order to reduce the amount of stuff we own, we have to not only get rid of the excess we already have, we have to keep ourselves from bringing in more than we’re getting rid of. Hopefully, asking yourself the two questions above before buying, will help you the way it helps me. Good luck.

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