How to make good buying decisions

Ever had a shopping frenzy? Or felt that you must buy something? Don’t feel bad, it’s the great marketing gear in the works. If everyone are as analytical as me, some people would be out of jobs and there’d be no point in persuasion.

Self analysis of my resilience

The establishing of life filters 1 and 2 helped me greatly, but I can’t attribute the great control of my impulses purely to that. It also has a lot to do with the fact that English is the 3rd language I learned in life. Whereas a girl who says fuck in Mandarin will make me think she has no class, the same “fuck” in English, will amuse me more than anything else because it’s rare to hear. As you can see, the emotional impact is different.

It doesn’t mean that I don’t get the impulses to shop. If anything, it is even harder to control the craving when the need to shop comes from within. Because you’ve already convinced yourself on an emotional level that you need something, thinking that it is perfect for your lifestyle, but do you really need it? The hard part is to convince yourself otherwise.

Wait before you buy

First of all, wait before you buy. If you are enticed by certain “deals”, you usually have time to wait it out a bit before the deals are off. I usually wait till 3 days before the end date to exercise that option. Sometimes you can even just tell the sales person that you’ve seen this deal before and ask for it. So a deadline is never a deadline in a sales person’s dictionary. Waiting also gets rid of the heightened emotions that you feel at that moment which compels you to make mistakes in your analysis.

There will always be other great deals

To prove the truthfulness of this, I asked a mattress sales person on the price of the one I am interested in (Of course it’s on sale at that moment and last only for 3 more days.) and checked back after a few weeks. What did I find? The same price on the same 50% off liquidation sale.

Take a test drive

Always test the item against the function which you intend it to do. You might think that it functions in a certain way, but in reality, it doesn’t. Your mind constructed the fantasy. Furthermore, are you buying it with speculation that it might be able to be changed to do something else? Is that method proven with testimonials? This is where Google comes in handy. A quick search on certain items will always land you numerous negative reviews. Don’t take it all as truth, certain people just have no clue, but read those who provide careful analysis of the unit and weight it against your own way of using the item. Things like ergonomically uncomfortable are usually ignored by me since I enjoy adapting to new ways of interaction. But if a hacked Wiimote introduces a 200msec delay in game, that’s a deal breaker for me because I like sniping. So test driving will actually act as a counter balance to the euphoria you are feeling. Have an clear idea of which need the item has to satisfy and think of a few deal breakers where no means no.

Compare prices

Again, how much of a price difference can you ignore? I am up to a point where $20 difference in price can be ignored. I make most of my savings while buying expensive items like fridges and stove. Since the time it takes to find another item of $20 savings is not worth it. Items under the range of $200 are simply bought without comparing prices. (The most basic discount is 10% so 10% of $200 is $20).

End

I hope you enjoyed this and that this will help you in the future in determining what to buy, or to quench your thirst to buy a new iPhone. Below is an example for my reason to ignore all the gadget craze. It is very simple:

UMPC is coming and it won’t be long until Apple comes up with a touchscreen tablet PC. The technologies are already there, just not cheap enough to bring everything together yet. When that time comes, I won’t be needing any gadget at all. What do you need in a gadget? Mine are simple, make phone calls online, connect wirelessly to the net, listening to MP3, touch screen to draw in photoshop. Why waste money?