How many times have you, or your family, filled up a shopping cart at Target before even making it half-way through the store? At Target, for example, I could spend hours leisurely strolling the isles for the latest-and-greatest items and the endcaps for their very tempting bargain items. Many things would find their way into my shopping basket. But before going through the check-out I would ask myself a series of questions that would reduce the number of items I would ultimately take home.

Here is the list of questions to go through:

• Is this a need or a want?
• Can I live without this?
• If I buy it today will it enhance my life today?
• Do I have one of these, or something similar to it already?
• Does someone have one that I may be able to borrow?

At times I would even ask myself why I am shopping in the first place. Am I shopping out of boredom? Depression? Or am I actually accomplishing a chore, one of many tasks on my to-do list of the day?

Shopping didn’t become less fun when I was forced to run my shopping cart through the filter of these questions. It felt good to know I was being responsible about living within my financial limits. The silver lining though, was it reinforced what I really already knew, that…

…living a plentiful life doesn’t mean living with a lot.

That is a hard lesson to grasp in today’s consumer driven culture. We are constantly bombarded with more choices, bigger sales, new discount stores and outlet centers. A message of value is equated with volume. A third of our national economy relies solely on consumer spending.

I have to admit, occasionally I fall off the wagon. I’ll buy something even though it doesn’t pass my need vs. want criteria. I buy it “just because.” And don’t you know, it never works out doing so. Those “just because” items are the shoes in my closet that I never wear, or the sweater that still has the tag on it, or the picture frames that still don’t have pictures in them.

When I do my semi-annual sweep of unused items from my home, someone at Goodwill will have the opportunity to buy a brand-new pair of shoes, a sweater with its original tag, and a picture frame still wrapped in plastic because I forgot I already had three just like it.

Remember need vs. want. It works.

Related posts:

1. On Growing Up
2. Gift for You: Time Management Tool
3. Are Time-Limits Limiting You?