Sunday Morning Amazon Shopping Ritual
By Melissa Tosetti
A few years ago, I worked with a professor at a prominent university. At the time he was working on a project outside of his work for the school.
As part of his research, he ordered a lot of books on Amazon and realized he was spending $100 - $200 a week. He decided to cut back on the purchases, but had to make sure it wouldn’t negatively affect his research.
After some thought, he created the Sunday Morning Amazon Shopping Ritual - Throughout the week, as he finds titles he wants to purchase, he puts them in his cart, but doesn’t buy them yet. Then, every Sunday morning, he sits down with a cup of coffee, reviews his cart and decides which books to purchase.
There are several reasons why this is such a powerful habit:
He sees the total of just how much he would have spent and that knowledge makes him pickier.
He’s able to see how many of the books he planned to purchase crossed over or were practically duplicates.
His ritual entails reviewing the cart in the morning when he still has plenty of willpower and is able to make better decisions than at night when his willpower is fatigued.
This is one of my favorite habits to pass on to clients that want to streamline their online spending. Being able to see the accumulation of what they would have spent with one-click here and one-click there throughout the week helps them make much better spending decisions. This is an especially helpful habit for those that find themselves on Amazon during their lunch hour when they’ve had a trying morning.
So, go ahead and put those items in your cart, but wait until Sunday morning to pull the trigger.You may feel very differently about those purchases first thing in the morning, and reviewing it with the rest of the items that caught your attention throughout the week.
Melissa Tosetti is a cash flow planning expert, founder of The Savvy Life and author of the international bestseller Living The Savvy Life.
For the past nine years, she’s worked with over 625 individuals and families to create Spending Plans.
To learn about the Spending Plan process, visit The Savvy Life’s Home Page. If you’d like to learn about how The Savvy Life works with financial advisors and their clients visit: The Savvy Life Advisor’s Page.
