One of my library books this week is ‘Coach yourself to Wealth’ by Martin Hawes and Joan Baker. Often from a whole book you may only find one idea that really strikes a chord with you but that one idea can often be a real light bulb moment. Although I have been working hard to get our finances into a surplus situation each month I still have been seeing each dollar as simply a dollar. Hawes and Barker promote the idea of thinking of the cost of an item not just in dollars today but as dollars in the future. Working out what a dollar spent could ‘earn’ you instead in terms of investing it or paying off your mortgage can help you work out the ‘real’ cost of your spending. Every dollar you don’t spend can be put to work for you 24 hours a day every day while items you buy are depreciating rapidly. This way every time you decide not to spend you can see it almost as a mini pay increase which makes it a positive action than you want to carry out. Working out what an item can cost me over a 20 yr period would seem to be another good strategy to help slow down impulse buying.
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