You Should Create an Annual Plan Instead of a Budget — Here’s Why
According to The Motley Fool, the average consumer visits Target 43 times per year, spending around $50 per visit. That might not seem like a lot but that totals up to a whopping $2,150 per year. If you’re earning $50,000 a year, that’s about 4% of your salary spent at one store.
Multiply that by every store you visit on a regular basis and that’ll tell you where all your money is going.
Shopping isn’t inherently a bad thing. In fact, our consumer-centric model of capitalism depends on it.
The problem is that stores aren’t designed to meet your immediate needs. They are planned around behavioral human psychology to extract as much money from you as possible. That means every time you step foot inside a store, you’re at risk of spending way more money than you intend to.
Personal finance gurus will tell you to be disciplined. You should create a list and use sheer willpower to stick to it. While that makes sense in theory, it doesn’t work in practice. The more you fail to stick to your list the more you’ll feel defeated.
The solution isn’t to test your willpower on a weekly basis, it’s to eliminate the need to do so in the first place. That means reducing the number of trips you make to stores altogether.
