When costs are rising and money is tight, it’s understandable to clamp down on your finances and start cutting costs that are deemed unnecessary. While this might be necessary from a fiscal standpoint, it might also lead to situations where you’re not spending your money on anything that you find enjoyable, instead just using it to pay for resources and bills.
That’s an extreme far end of this mentality, but it’s valuable to examine some instances where something that you might deem a luxury can have the same impact as a necessity, potentially changing the perspective that you have on it.
Making Your Life Easier
Perhaps you’re unwilling to spend the extra money due to the fact that you’re able to achieve the same end through your own means. That’s fair enough – why get a taxi when you can walk? However, distilling every single situation down to the fact that you can do something on your own doesn’t necessarily mean that this route is worth the additional trouble. At the end of the day, you’re not paying for nothing; you’re paying for something that can remove stress and difficulty from a situation. This is noticeable when you examine moving companies like shiply.com that can help you to transport all of the belongings from your old home to your new one. Of course, this is something that you might be able to do yourself with enough trips – but is that really worth the hassle? Furthermore, might that route simply lead to you spending more on smaller costs like the fuel involved? It’s a question worth asking at these intervals.
The Importance of Social Occasions
Opting to stay in at the weekend instead of seeing your friends might be a decision that you come to due to financial reasons, but that doesn’t necessarily make it the right one. It’s easy to see something as unnecessary or somehow indulgent if you gain enjoyment out of it, but seeing your friends is something that can serve a very powerful mental health function – a release, an escape and a time to unwind.
What you might look to cut down on here instead could be the costs involved with seeing your friends. Instead of going out drinking or out to eat, you might consider having dinner parties or movie nights, or other activities that can help you to get the best out of these times.
The Long Run
Something like a new console or an upgrade to your laptop, phone or computer can feel pretty difficult to justify. Such a purchase can be expensive and why make it at all when the old model is just as good? However, for these purchases, while they might not cross the bridge into being necessary, the positive impact that they can make on your enjoyment might be better measured over a long timeframe instead of the immediate future. After all, if you’re not able to unwind comfortably, or struggle to see your phone properly through the cracked screen, you might feel stress once again starting to accumulate.
