Are there any big picture money-saving tactics youd like to talk about?
One of the more practical parts of my book goes to this issue of discretionary spending. I once heard a home organization expert say that 80 percent of the discretionary stuff we buy goes unused or underutilized. His point was that if we are more organized we can make better use of what we have. My contention is: Let’s figure out what that 80 percent is and then don’t buy it. The other day I heard a similar statistic—that 80 percent of what we buy, within a year we regret that we bought it. If we buy it and don’t use it or we buy it and regret it, how is it increasing our happiness? That’s why I encourage people to wait at least a week—my mandatory waiting period—before making a purchase. At least 50 percent of the time you never go back. And a lot of times when you do go back you say, “What? I was going to buy this?” This is one of the few things we can do as consumers to battle back against the 3,000 commercial messages we hear every day. Well, the American economy is built on consum
