By Wendy Mihm | Monday November 29, 2010
Today’s money saving tip is about removing retail email temptation. At it’s essence, this is about removing the temptation to buy something you really don’t even need and, in fact, were not even looking for in the first place.
To help illustrate how unimportant clothing can sometimes be, try this exercise.
Think back to one of your favorite memories with a bunch of old high school or college friends. Maybe you were all at the beach or at a backyard BBQ listening to reggae and dancing. Maybe you were all gathered around someone’s coffee table at midnight, playing a game of charades and drinking beer. Now, quick, tell me what you were wearing. Go ahead. Tell me. Can’t do it, can you? It’s because it wasn’t important enough to remember. What mattered were your friends and how much you laughed, not how much you spent on the clothes you wore.
Don’t get me wrong. I love fashion as much as the next woman and I enjoy finding bargains – as you may have witnessed in our Deals and Steals section. I also understand that looking your best in certain circumstances can be quite important. But sometimes the addictive quality of buying clothes, shoes and other material things can get us into financial trouble. So today’s saving money tip is about removing one of the most common and powerful financial temptations around today: the retailer email.
Today’s money saving tip is to take yourself off the email list of every clothing, shoe or handbag retailer that currently sends you any email at all. I know. You’ll miss all their big sales. But here’s the secret about sales: you’re not usually saving money by participating sales. Unless a sale happens to come along right when you are already in the market for a particular item, you’re really just spending money on things you don’t need. If you truly need something – need it, not want it – I promise you will remember that these retailers exist when that need arises. Then when the time comes, you will go to that retailer’s store and buy The Very Important Thing. Or you will go to their website, put The Very Important Thing into your shopping cart, find an online coupon code for free shipping and/or some other discount, check out, and log off.
These retailer emails are purely emotional in nature – they show you pretty pictures of pretty women sipping lattes and walking with handsome men down fabulous city streets – and they try to get you to crave the rush of the purchase or the swagger of the status. And they do it because it works – on you, on me, on all of us. So make it easier on yourself and just remove the temptation by removing the emails.
Simply open the email and scroll to the bottom there should be an “unsubscribe” option. Click on it. That may do the trick. Or it may take you to a web page and ask you again if you want to unsubscribe.
Just click “unsubscribe” again. Bing! Done.
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