Impulse Buying: How to get out from this marketing and psychological web?

Impulse buying is extremely normal and prevalent in many people. This gets further triggered by the presence of online shopping applications, stress, boredom, depression, social influence, sales and marketing traps, etc. Here’s what you can do to reduce this psychological and financial strain on yourself.

How to curb impulse buying?

There are some simple and effective means of reducing your urge to buy more and spend more. If you start following some of these, then you might be able to control your impulse buying on time.

The Deal psychology

Whenever you look at offers which say Buy 1 Get 1, or x % off for limited time only or a special deal of the day, it triggers the buyer’s psychology and you end up buying things which you probably don’t even need. In an urgency of grabbing what’s on offer you often forget to do a price check with other places and see if the product you are buying is actually worth so much.

Take help from budgeting tools

If you have the tendency of going overboard with spending money and impulse buying things, then use a budget tracker and assign a budget to each of your requirements. This might mean X for home requirements or Y for personal requirements, etc. This was in the first few months you try to achieve the goal of sticking to the budget and later automatically you will notice that you actually purchasing below the budget. This will also make way for savings.

Wire your brain

Remember impulse buying often starts from the brain itself. Try to wire it to be content through gratitude journals, diary writing, wishlist journal etc. See if the number of items under what you want starts disappearing after a while making way for contentment and peace within yourself and erasing unnecessary desires.

Create intent

Every time you enter a shopping space with an empty mind and no checklist, you would probably end up buying a lot more than you need. To prevent this, ideally create a checklist and go to a place with intent. Try sticking to that list and see what you need immediately and what can wait a while. This will help reduce you shopping spree tendency to an extent.

Spending trouble

At times, be harsh on yourself so that the end goal fine tunes you as a person. To manage your financial problems coming out of over spending and impulse buying, un-save all card details from your online purchasing application. Unsubscribe yourself from marketing mails from brands so that information about deals and offers fail to lure you. Try to remove shopping apps from the devices. Often when you get bored or have nothing to do, you turn to shopping apps from the comfort of your home and end up buying things you don’t require. Use cash while spending. This helps you calculate your budget and how much you can actually spend.

Apply timestamps

Once you have put items that you require in your shopping cart, do not purchase them immediately. Come back after 24-hours and open the cart. Ask yourself if you will still need the items on your cart and start deleting what you don’t need any more. This helps in reducing your urge to buy things.

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