One of the best ways to reduce your spending is to cut back on the items that you dont NEED to buy. Every time youre on the verge of buying something, ask yourself do I really need this, or is it just another whim that will lie in a carrier bag in my spare room? Can I live my life without buying it?

Those who confuse things that they want with things that they need will find it much harder to save money to repay their debts.

The ability to distinguish between the two will allow you to cut out all frivolous and unnecessary expense from your life.

Youll no longer be the shopkeepers dream, clamouring to thrust your hard earned money into their till in exchange for more non-essential consumer items, seduced yet again by fanciful notions of how much their special offers will allow you to SAVE!

Heres how their misguided reasoning works. They think to themselves, It should have cost me $100, but I got it for $70, so Ive really SAVED $30. And this is usually accompanied by their friends and family making sympathetic noises such as, oh well done.

You could be mistaken for thinking that theyd just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Shopping, not just bought something that was being openly sold at a reduced price!

Okay, if they NEEDED to buy the item then I would be the first person to agree that theyve SAVED $30. But if they merely WANTED to buy that product then at best theyve SPENT $30 less than they would otherwise have done. At worst, it could be said that theyve actually WASTED $70!

But thats one of the risks if you confuse what you want with what you need. If you think that you NEED everything that you WANT, you are more likely to be drawn in by consumer marketing.

Every time you buy something at a discount, youll be under the impression that youre SAVING money when in fact youre SPENDING more than you strictly need to. And even worse, because you think that you NEED everything that you buy, youll be unable to identify areas where you can spend less.

So let me spell this out. If you dont need the item that youre buying, then you are NOT saving money. You cant be! Its IMPOSSIBLE! This applies even if you receive a 99% discount on the product in question.

If you want to save money, then learn to separate what you need from what you want. And if youre still not convinced, ask yourself why youre reading a website about how to get out of debt. Do you really want to get out of debt? Only YOU can answer that question.

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