Make a plan or budget, and follow through
“My parents never taught me about money.”
“Living modestly and being happy with what you have — therein lies the success of saving.”
Popular culture plays a part as well. “People watch TV and think they have to live the life of characters on their shows,” says DebtSmart.com creator Scott Bilker.
“We have lost a tactile sense of money,” says Rakesh Gupta, associate dean of the School of Business at Adelphi University in Garden City, N.Y. “We’re using plastic now. It doesn’t seem like money. When we have a roll of money that gets smaller and smaller, we think about where we should spend it. Now that we can whip out a credit card or debit card, the pool of money seems endless.”
It is hard to save money, but we must try. We must begin by looking at ourselves and our needs, as opposed to our wants.
Fold ‘em
“The quickest way to double your money is to fold it and put it back in your pocket.”
—Author Unknown
Warehouse clubs. We’ve all been there—and most of us have carted out a giant container of something that, when we get home, we wonder what we were thinking at the time. How are we ever going to eat 10 pounds of dill pickles, and why did it seem like a good idea at the time we purchased them?
According to researchers Michael Norton and Leonard Lee in the Harvard Business School Working Knowledge for Business Leaders (http://hbswk.hbs.edu), one in every 11 people in the
Using both field data and studies in which they created their own “membership clubs,” the researchers found:
• Consumers behave irrationally when there are membership fees.
• When stores charge fees, consumers infer a “fees/savings” link because they believe the stores charge the fees in order to offer members better prices.
• The mere presence of fees leads to increased spending.
• Consumers were more likely to express a desire to shop at stores that charged fees than those that did not—even when products and savings were similar.
follow: RSS