PSA Thursday: To Buy or Not to Buy?

Afford Anything | Make Smart Money Choices

Paula Pant | Cumulus Podcast Network

Investing, Entrepreneurship, Business

4.7 • 3.6K Ratings

🗓️ 3 December 2020

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Many people in the personal finance / FIRE community have a complicated relationship with the concept of consumer spending. They may see family, friends and neighbors demonstrate one extreme -- they’re profligate spenders who will buy anything -- and, in an effort to be nothing like them, they may overcompensate by becoming extreme penny-pinchers. (I see this often at the start of a person’s FIRE journey, when the pendulum is swinging sharply in the other direction). The reality is that neither extreme is healthy. There’s a middle ground between being so gullible that you’ll buy anything vs. being so cynical that you build a wall that shuts real value out of your life and hampers your growth. In recognition of that balanced middle path, today’s PSA Thursday episode focuses on five questions that you should ask yourself before making a purchase. #1: Do I have high-interest debt or an inadequate emergency fund? #2: Is this a purchase or an investment? #3: How long have I been thinking about this? #4: Is this only serving an emotional need, or does it also have greater utility? #5: The five “ity’s” -- longevity, durability, applicability, versatility, utility. We elaborate on these five points in today’s PSA Thursday episode. Enjoy! For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/psathursday Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to PSA Thursday. This is a weekly-ish bonus segment of the Affordable Care Podcast in which we talk about how to handle life in
0:08.8	2020. If you are new to PSA Thursday, please know that these are nothing like our normal episodes.
0:16.1	These episodes are much shorter than what we normally produce. There is no production value,
0:21.6	there's no intro music, no outro music, no sound effects. We do minimal editing. These are
0:26.7	street forward bullet point episodes. Each one hyper-focused on one specific topic that relates to life in
0:35.3	2020. So in the past we have covered how to set up a donor advised fund if the events of 2020 have inspired you to make more charitable donations.
0:42.2	We have covered how to manage your student loans in the context of
0:46.9	changes to student loan repayment policies that happened in 2020. We covered how to teach a gram on grandpa to use
0:53.4	technology. We covered how to teach them, including teaching them from afar, how to be more well versed with technology.
1:00.3	You can find all of these episodes and more in our PSA Thursday archives, which are available at affordable anything.com slash PSA Thursday.
1:08.2	We are releasing this episode on Thursday, December 3rd. It is currently the middle of Cyber Week.
1:14.5	It's the week after Thanksgiving. It used to be Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but now it's Cyber Week.
1:19.4	It's a week and truly Cyber Month. I mean, it's the holiday shopping season. There are
1:25.0	stores everywhere in and dating us with ads for everything from TVs to
1:30.4	clothing to blenders, kitchenware, at home sporting equipment, any type of consumer discretionary item that you can imagine.
1:38.6	You're going to be hearing about it this month. It is a major retail month. And so in acknowledgement of that,
1:46.4	the topic for today's PSA Thursday episode is
1:49.9	2-by or not 2-by.
1:52.6	5 questions that you should ask yourself or 5 topics that you should consider as you are making a decision about whether or not to make a
2:01.0	consumer discretionary purchase.
2:03.0	If you Google this question, you'll find a lot of online listicles with
2:07.3	repetitive, cliché advice around how to make a decision as to whether or not to buy something.
	...

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