Who wouldn’t like shopping? It’s always a pleasure to spend money. Well, at least, the retail industry explores everything to make it a pleasure to shop. It’s the nature of capitalistic society that customers are well served. So it shouldn’t be hard to realize customers experience pleasure when they shop. But it seems that every pleasure comes with pain! Remember a nice day at shopping mall? Remember the smile on your face and joy in your eyes when you walked out of a store with a new shiny pair of shoes and flashy stylish handbag? Now it’s time to pay your credit card bill… and as you look at those hefty charges, you can hardly recall that pleasure at the frenzy shopping moment. Instead, you’re now overwhelmed with a painful feeling: the credit card bill just takes away your whole paycheck, while you still barely have a chance to enjoy that extra new shoes or the luxury handbag!

You must have heard plenty of excuses ranging from just-plain-stupid ones like “I just can’t help it” to more seemingly-profound-thinking excuses such as “if everyone tied up their pockects, the economy would be in recession!” Well, let me tell you what, don’t worry about the economy just yet. The bottom line is, if your expenses exceed your incomes, you’ll be in trouble. So if you’re like me, counting on paycheck after paycheck to make ends meet, you should say good-bye to any luxury shopping. It’s easier said then done. In reality, nobody seems to have time or resources to effectively tell the difference between luxury and non-luxury shopping. In other words, everything seems to be necessity at the time of shopping, only to be “re-defined” luxury at a later time (when returns or refunds are out of question!). What I found more practical to treat this “shopping phenomenon” is to avoid it altogether! Forget about shopping. Try stay home and do something else. Only buy something when you realize that you can’t live on without it. For example, weekly groceries and supplies such as tooth paste and soap are something considered necessity, while new clothes or new electronics are best suspect of luxury.

It’s not easy to avoid shopping, especially for those who develop this nasty habbit. Imagine you’re like a naive sheep that focuses on finding grass to eat most of the time, while advertisers and marketers are like a bunch of hungry wolves, whose main task is to find a way to eat you alive. They set all kinds of trap in front of you like, “the more you spend, the more you save,” or “this huge discount will be gone forever.” So instead of living within your means, you step out of your safety zone and fall victim to those predators.

To overcome this challenge is to develop your own defense system. More specifically, you need to develop the ability to counter those “commercial attacks.” Most people yield to those attacks because they have too much spare time, when human beings are most vulnerable to psychological attacks. So the most effective way to fight back is to make yourself busy. Having spare time? Try doing something that earn money instead of spending them. Thanks to the Internet these days, making money doesn’t have to be hard labor outdoors. You can actually use your computer to search around for best earning opportunities and make serious income with your PC. Or at the least, start selling your unused items on eBay(TM) for little cash inflow. Even if it won’t replace your day job, you will succeed in curbing down your unnecessary wastes on shopping.