Do you get a rush when you come home with a bag of goodies from your favorite store?  Does your heart start to beat a little faster after clicking “Buy Now” online?

Refocuser is all about life-improvement through appropriate focus.  I’d bet that living in today’s economy makes being financially responsible an important goal for just about everybody reading this blog.  And while I’m not always going to go into depth on money tactics, it’s worth calling out just one way I’ve found that works well to curtail spending.

I’ve discovered that when I would purchase something on impulse, I rarely regretted it (I don’t do regret).  But in most cases, had I just waited out the impulse a bit, it likely would have subsided without requiring me to pull out my wallet.  So I started thinking about how to get that feeling of instant gratification without plunking down hard-earned cash.

The trick I’ve found is to convince myself that I’ve just purchased something even when I haven’t.  The satisfaction I’d get from clicking “Buy Now” is fulfilled without spending any money.  And what I’m really doing is satisfying the urge I have to be a packrat and accumulate stuff – which in many cases is what spurs any impulsive purchasing.  The trick here is that I’m actually accumulating information (for free) about what I’d like to acquire, while not actually acquiring anything tangible at all. 

I think about this as closing an open loop.  When you want something badly enough, your mind sees it as unresolved.  So you tend to dwell on it.  You think about it, mull over it, and beat yourself up until you decide if you’re going to act on the impulse.  The key is to “close the loop” as quickly as possible to put your mind at ease.  It just so happens that buying something can close that loop, but there are other ways to convince yourself that you’ve figured out what to do with something.

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