The Danger With Spending Money that Nobody Ever Tells You About
There exist people who like shopping. I am told that all women like shopping. When I needed new orthotics, and they did not fit into my existing shoes, the doctor excitedly told me that now I had an excuse to go shopping for new shoes. He couldn’t have chosen a more discouraging thing to say.
Don’t get me wrong; I like nice things. However…! Allow me to tell you about a trap that opens up the moment you get out your wallet. This is a tripwire that I haven’t heard anyone talking about. It might be counter-intuitive, but stay with me.
The problem is that the more shopping you do, the more shopping you need to do.
Wait, what? It doesn’t seem to make sense at first. After all, imagine buying your weekly groceries. Now that you have bought your groceries, you have your meals and snacks for the week, and at least for that week, you now don’t need to do any more grocery shopping.
So far, so good. But it’s not always like that. It’s often not like that at all.
Some years ago, our family acquired a new fridge. I didn’t feel like buying a new one, but with the old one being fifteen years old, with a light that no longer turned on, and drawers that would only slide in after many tries, I allowed myself to be persuaded. It all seemed like a good plan until the day the new fridge was installed. For some reason, one of the standard pieces of hardware was not a good fit for the space we had, and resulted in the fridge leaking water constantly. Now we had to go shopping at the hardware store to find another piece of hardware that would fix the problem.
It just keeps happening.
- The moment you buy a pair of shoes (actually, no, the first time you wear them, so now you can’t return them), you will realize that in fact it doesn’t match all of your clothes. You thought it would, and it doesn’t. Now you’re supposed to buy another pair of shoes. Fashion for women appears to be engineered that way.You can think your way out of this sneaky scheme, but it takes effort.
- For every new dress that you buy, it will likely turn out that your existing bras do not work with it and now you have to search for a new one.
- For a new car, you may also want roof racks and waterproof mats, and there is a reasonable chance your previous ones will not fit this vehicle.
- The moment you decide you’ll buy a fish at the pet store, you will be required to buy a tank and equipment that goes with it that you never knew existed. A week later, you’ll be back at the store to buy water treatments because it turns out getting the pH of the water right is a major project in itself.
- As soon as you buy a new piece of furniture, all your other furniture will look old and drab by contrast, and prod you to replace them.
- As soon as you purchase one decorative item for your home, you’ll realize the rest of your home is insufficiently decorated and will feel the pressure to go out and buy more things.
- If you get sucked into the idea that women must wear makeup, and buy some foundation, mascara, and lipstick, you will soon find out that in fact, to wear makeup properly, you “need” primer (also separate primers for lips and eyelids), blush, contour, highlighter, bronzer, concealer, setting spray, lip liner, eyeliner, brow filler, and eyeshadow in every color under the sun. Oh, and you’ll be told that you need different products for daytime makeup versus nighttime makeup (which is said with good reason, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s more products and more work).
- Once you have purchased a few fancy serving platters, it will be revealed to you that you need special cheese knives, a nice cheese board, an elegant cake cutting implement, specialized serving containers for sugar and milk to go with tea and coffee, and the correct sauce boat for gravy.
- If you have taken up sewing, you might think that the only thing you want to buy is a sturdy, entry-level sewing machine. Not so. You’ll soon find out that the right thread is important, that it is helpful to have more than one color of thread available, that different fabrics demand different sewing machine needles, and that to cut out a pattern you should have fabric scissors, a cutting mat, pattern weights, tailor’s chalk, and an infinite number of pins.
- If you are taking up a new sport, you will suddenly find out that you are lacking all kinds of “necessary” equipment. Consider sports that involve taking a watercraft out onto a body of water. I have managed to do such activities in a swimsuit or rain pants, depending on the time of year. But I almost got sucked into buying a wet suit, just because the websites said I should, and the websites didn’t care whether I was going out on the ocean or on my calm, local lake.
So, please beware. Shopping begets shopping. You can’t always avoid shopping, but any procrastination on shopping might actually save you even more time and money than you thought it would.
