In my most recent book, The Simple Dollar, I spent some time talking about passive barriers. A passive barrier is a small barrier that you set up that will make a particular bad habit more difficult to continue or, sometimes, make a particular good habit easier to repeat. Putting your cigarettes in a hard-to-reach place (or throwing them away) if you’re trying to quit or putting the television remote on the other side of the house from where the television is if you’re trying to cut down your television viewing are both passive barriers – they make continuation of a bad habit more difficult.

Of course, there are many opportunities to utilize passive barriers in your own financial life. I certainly use them in my own life in order to subtly push myself into good financial habits.

Here are nine passive barriers you can utilize in your own life to encourage better financial results:

Hide your credit cards
Freeze them in ice (actually, I should make a post about doing just that…). Put them in an envelope in the attic. Delete the numbers from your online accounts. Cut them up, even. The entire point is to make it more difficult for you to gain access to your credit cards to use them for impulsive spending. If you don’t have the card with you, it’s pretty hard to buy something you don’t need on credit, isn’t it?

Set up automatic savings transfers
It’s easy to tell ourselves that we’re going to start saving, but the actual process of doing that can be challenging. You have to regularly make that transfer into your savings account and it’s easy to just forget about it, whether consciously or not. Instead, set up an automatic savings transfer that pulls a little bit out of your checking account each week and moves it into your savings. Boom – you’re saving money without the effort.

Set up automatic investing plans
You can do the same thing with most investing accounts. Set it up so that a certain amount is withdrawn from your checking account monthly and transferred to your investment account. Essentially, you’re doing dollar cost averaging without even thinking about it and building up your investment in whatever you choose to invest in without the opportunity to overthink.

Change your driving routes
When I commuted to work, I used to drive by a bookstore each day, both ways. I also drove by a coffee shop that had some killer bagels. Unsurprisingly, these two things would cause a lot of impulse buying on my part. The best solution I found was to simply start utilizing a different driving route to work, one that was basically the same length but took me through a residential neighborhood and near a football stadium instead of the commercial district. The impulsive temptation to stop more or less went away – a passive barrier.

Put your savings in a remote bank
Many people find success saving, but when that savings has built up to a good number, they give into temptation and spend it on a big splurge instead of holding onto it for emergencies. Often, this is made easy by having the money in a local bank, where you can easily access it via a quick stop at the bank. If you put your savings in a more remote bank, it becomes harder to just withdraw it on a whim and, often, you have to think about that withdrawal, talking yourself out of it.

Put your retirement savings in a retirement account
If you’re saving for retirement, don’t put it in a savings account or an ordinary investing account. Put it in a Roth IRA, where you get some tax benefits from saving for retirement and can face some stiff penalties if you withdraw it early or use it for other things. These penalties create a real passive barrier against misuse of retirement savings.

Put your education savings in an education account
You can do the same thing with education savings. Instead of just saving money in an ordinary savings account, put that money in a 529 and let the money build there. As with the Roth IRA, there are extra benefits if you use it the right way and penalties if you use it in another way, thus encouraging you to leave it alone and use it for education.

Leave your wallet in the glove box
If you’re stopping at a store where you often give into temptations, just put your wallet in the glove compartment before you go in. This way, you don’t have cash or credit handy when an impulse comes up – you have to go to all the effort of going out to your car, getting yoru wallet, and going back into the store. That’s a lot of effort, especially for an impulse buy, and it can be just enough to convince you not to do it.

Eliminate consumption habits
A final tactic was alluded to in the introduction: if you have consumption habits, like drugs or alcohol or smoking, putting those consumptives in a hard-to-access place makes it a bit more difficult to actually use them. The less you use them, the less money goes down the tubes into buying the materials for your consumption. So, put the alcohol in the attic. Put the cigarettes in the rafters. Flush the drugs down the toilet. Make it hard for you to use them again.

Passive barriers have another benefit, too: they eventually create a new “channel” for your normal behavior. Soon, you’ll find that things like not giving into impulses when you’re in a store or not consuming expensive drinks becomes the normal in your life – and your wallet will thank you.

As I’ve mentioned on here several times, I have a weekly piano lesson, something I enjoy very much. On my way to my lesson, I drive by a bookstore and a game shop. On my way home from my lesson, I drive by that same bookstore and same game shop.

Every week, especially on the way home, I’m tempted to stop. I see the game shop coming up on the right and I get an impulse to stop there. I see the bookstore a little bit later on the left and I get an impulse to stop there.

Yet, almost always, I resist.

Five years ago, I would have stopped, almost every time. I would have went into the game shop, thought about my friends, and picked up a new game to play with them (even though I have quite a few already). I would have stopped at the bookstore and picked up a few new books to read (even though I have a book backlog right now).

Today, at most, I’ll stop once every two months at one or the other of the shops, and even then, rarely do I walk out of the store with an item. If I do buy at such stores, I usually walk in the door knowing exactly what I’m looking for and walk out the door with just that item.

What caused this (hugely financially beneficial) change? Aside from the trite answer of “I just changed my perspective on life,” I found that a handful of tactics really facilitated this change.

Avoid impulsive moments
For me, the best immediate move to make was to simply get myself away from impulsive moments. I started driving a different route to work. I avoided social activities that revolved around buying stuff. I started even re-evaluating my hobbies in order to seek out ones that didn’t encourage impulsive buying (like walking in the woods, for example). The biggest reason for doing this was to simply break the cycle of impulsive buying.

Reflect (at length) on the times when you give into your impulses
If you do discover that you’ve given into an impulse, spend some time thinking about that event and why it happened. Why did you spend that money? Are you really happy with that purchase? What can you do to make sure it doesn’t happen again? You don’t need to beat yourself up over it, but you will find great reward in thinking about the “why” of the matter, as it will lead you towards not repeating the mistake.

Minimize your stress
When you’re stressed, you’re more impulsive. I certainly observe this in my own life – when I feel a lot of pressure and stress, I usually just seek immediate ways to relieve it, even if it’s not a good long-term choice. A new game or book feels good, so I’ll sometimes fall right into that. Thus, it’s useful to seek out ways to reduce the amount of stress in your life. I meditate, pray, play games, read, and play with my children – all of these help me de-stress.

Be accountable to someone else
This is particularly easy if you’re married. The way we do it is by having completely open bills – credit card statements, bank statements, and other such things are reviewed by both of us. Because of this, it’s impossible to “hide” things – we have to be fully honest with each other. If you have a spouse, I highly recommend this. Of course, if you don’t have such a partner, you may have more difficulty doing this – a trusted friend, perhaps.

Allow yourself some impulsiveness – but keep boundaries on it from the start
My wife and I each have some leniency when it comes to impulsive buys. We essentially each have an “allowance” with which we can each buy whatever we’d like. Often, I’ll buy a game or a book – my wife usually buys a book. This “allowance” often gives us just the freedom we need to not have a sense of being deprived while also keeping very good control over our personal finances.

Use the ten second rule and the thirty day rule
The “ten second rule” basically means that you should spend ten seconds thinking about any purchase you’re about to make before making it. This helps you to reflect on potential impulse purchases and often put them directly back on the shelf. The “thirty day rule” means that you should spend thirty days before buying any item that costs more than a certain threshold – say, $25. This prevents you from drowning yourself on an expensive impulse buy.

What’s your impulse?
Most of us have impulses that work in opposition to our financial goals. We buy gum or a bottle of soda at the checkout. We pick up a DVD. We buy some new clothes. We purchase a new gadget or a new book. Most of the time, these decisions are heavily impulsive – done on the spur of the moment – and we often feel bad about them later, particularly when we find we’re not using them much and now we’re facing a bill that we can’t easily handle.

Breaking free of such impulses can have a very large and dramatic effect on your finances. It becomes easier to budget and plan ahead. You suddenly have more resources each month with which you can save, pay off debts, or invest for the future. Best of all, you find that you value the things that you do buy a lot more than you used to.

Impulse control is an essential tool for personal finance success.

It seemed so incredibly simple. But it actually worked.

Last week, I visited a local bookstore. As I’ve mentioned many times, bookstores are one of my biggest weak spots. I can easily go into a bookstore and find myself picking up two or three interesting books before I’ve even really thought about it.

My usual line of defense against doing that is to simply limit my visits to bookstores. I’ve stopped going to the local bookstore with any degree of frequency and only visit them when I need a book on a specific topic, which is why I went there that day. (Are you ready for this? I was looking for a book about knitting.) However, that “reason” never seems to stop me from browsing the shelves, finding a book or two I “need” (meaning I don’t really need it), and buying it anyway.

Before I entered the store this time, though, I tried something different.

I sat in my car for a moment and focused on picturing myself walking out of the bookstore with only a book on knitting. I tried to imagine it in as much detail as I could, picturing the cover of the book and my otherwise empty hands, my pace out of the store, my sense of happiness in not buying anything extra that I didn’t need.

Then I stepped out of the car, went inside, and did just that.

The most interesting part is that I didn’t even consider buying anything extra while I was in there. Instead, I just had a strong, almost overwhelming sense that I was just going to pick up a knitting book, buy it, and walk out the door – and that’s exactly what I did.

Since then, I’ve been using outcome visioning with success (of varying degrees) in other aspects of life. I’ve visualized myself completing an article that seemed really challenging (it worked well). I’ve visualized myself cleaning out the garage (started with enthusiasm, but trailed off after kid distraction). I’ve visualized myself paying bills (worked very well). I’ve visualized myself cleaning out all of the basement closets (started well, got tired and went to bed).

What I’ve found is that, at least for me, outcome visioning works really well for small things – tasks that can be completed in two hours or less. If I use it on larger tasks than that – like ones that have to be broken down into multiple sessions – it can still work, but I usually need to envision the outcome again before I start up on a later session.

Another element that is useful for success at this is focusing on envisioning things that are easy to mentally picture. It’s hard to envision things like “being debt free” or “feeling good about myself.” Instead, focus on tangible things that lead to the outcome you want. Instead of focusing on “being debt free,” focus on specific acts of frugality that you’re not used to and let the outcome from that flow towards your goal. Instead of focusing on “feeling good about myself,” focus on an activity that will cause that good feeling – like exercise.

Also, never forget that visualization is a mental aid, not a substitute It doesn’t matter how bad you want it or how much you visualize it, you still have to pick up your feet and do it.

Give it a shot this week on something small that you know you’ll struggle with a bit, then move in full steam ahead. You’ll probaby be surprised how much it helps.

Anxiety disorder. Depression. Panic attacks. Intense phobias.

Our brains are incredibly complex pieces of meat. Just like other parts of their body, they can break down and not work quite right. Yet, society often treats ailments of the mind as something either not to be spoken of or something to be looked at as an intense personal flaw.

Yet, just like any other medical ailment, the cause is often out of the person’s control.

I have battled depression on and off for years. I often convince myself that I am a failure at writing (or whatever else I’m doing) and I then convince myself not to do it any more. I am a ridiculously tough critic on myself and I often turn combative about the work that I do produce, because I often think that if the stuff I create after all of this effort still isn’t good, I must truly be a failure. There are times when I can write tons and tons of words. There are other times when I simply can’t make myself write. That’s depression at work, my friends.

A few stories from baseball along these same lines:

Kansas City Royals kid pitching sensation Zack Greinke started last season 5-0 with a 0.50 ERA (not a misprint) and 44 K’s, and he went on to win the Cy Young [award given to the best two pitchers in baseball]. Just four seasons ago, depression and social anxiety nearly caused him to quit baseball. A sports psychologist and anti-depressants helped him recover, as did the Royals. “We’ve been able to create an environment that has clear direction and a consistent way of doing things where Zack feels comfortable,” GM Dayton Moore told USA Today.

In 2000, St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Rick Ankiel, then just 21 years old, was unexpectedly thrust into starting Game 1 of the NL Division Series against future Hall of Famer Greg Maddux and the Atlanta Braves. After two solid innings, Ankiel cracked, walking four hitters in the third. More critically, he threw five wild pitches in the third inning alone — becoming the first major leaguer to do that in more than a century. He later joked about it, but he never pitched well again.

One can find thousands of stories from other fields, but baseball alone, as a singular example, has a mountain of them.

Here are some sure signs that mental health may be standing in the way of your success.

You experience a loss of desire to do things that once filled you with passion. Yes, people have changing interests over time, but if you find yourself walking away from many of the things you used to love and instead spending time alone or involved in sedentary activties, that’s often a sign of a mental health concern.

You find it difficult to do the routine things in your life. If you were once a good housekeeper and find yourself not keeping house, that’s a sign. If you’ve started to allow your personal hygiene to slack off, that’s another sign. If you eat nothing but convenience foods, that’s yet another sign.

Your thoughts are filled with negativity toward yourself. Most people are hard wired to think of themselves in a positive fashion, not a negative one. If you continually think negative thoughts about yourself and the things that you do, you might want to take note of it and do something about it.

You drift away from lots of existing relationships at once. If you find yourself suddenly avoiding people and spending a lot of time alone because you don’t want to face them, that’s another potential cause for concern.

Your finances, once solid, are spiraling out of control. When people feel their happiness slipping away, they’ll often throw whatever they can at the problem – and in many cases, this takes the form of unnecessary spending.

All of these are possible signs of a mental health concern. All of these are also things that can have a severe detrimental effect on your level of personal, professional, and financial success.

At the same time, here are some things you can do to improve your mental health state.

Go outside. This is the first step anyone should take. Instead of sitting inside, sit outside on the front step or on your balcony. Breathe in the fresh air. Read outside. Most importantly, get a little sunshine. Sunshine on your skin produces vitamin D, of which many people are somewhat deficient. Vitamin D has profound effects on the brain and adequate amounts of vitamin D are almost always a net positive.

Whenever I begin to feel seriously down, I usually go outside for a while, if nothing else. It helps more consistently than any medicine under the sun, at least for me.

Get some exercise. Even if it’s something as simple as taking a walk around the block, getting a bit of exercise can always be a help. Exercise not only alters your metabolism, it also causes your body to release endorphins which trigger positive feelings.

Eat a healthier diet. What you put into your body makes a huge difference in how you feel. Try eating some very healthy foods as part of your routine. Eat some fruit for breakfast and a spinach salad for lunch for a few days and see what happens.

Seek out new friends. One’s mood can be seriously affected by the people around us. If your friends are making you feel worse about yourself, seek out new friends. Look for other social opportunities, often in a place very different than where you usually go. Try something completely different. The best place to start is by doing something that seems intriguing to you, but your friends would ridicule you for it.

Talk to your doctor. Medical help can be a powerful course of action if the above techniques do not help you get to a better place. If you sincerely try the above tactics and do not find any success, seek the advice of your most trusted doctor.

Most importantly, don’t be ashamed. You’re not alone in feeling this way. You’re never alone unless you choose to be.

What’s the single most important piece of personal finance advice you would give a person?

I’ve heard this question (or variations on it) many times. I have a very simple answer to it.

Whenever you buy anything, ask yourself why five times.

That seems really off the wall at first glance, but I firmly believe that no single piece of advice can match it in terms of getting your money under control.

I’ll show you what I mean through the lens of three purchases I considered recently.

I have about $1,000 saved up for a big personal purchase. I had been considering buying an iPad with it, even before the Apple announcement in January. I held one in my hands a couple days ago and considered it.
Why do you want an iPad? It’s an impressive gadget to hold in your hands. I can see myself using it and enjoying it.
Why would you use it? I can surf the web on it and read books on it and periodicals, too.
Why not just use your laptop? This is more portable.
Why not just use your iPod Touch? …
Why not just read a paperback? …

And, boom, my argument for buying an iPad goes down the chute. Sure, I can afford it, but why? It doesn’t fulfill a need in my life that isn’t already fulfilled by something else, or at least not in a compelling enough way to pay hundreds for it. Yes, I’ll probably buy a tablet computer someday, but not yet. It doesn’t actually fiil any sort of need.

I allow myself $30 a month to spend on books. I was in the bookstore recently, considering whether to pick up a copy of a novel I’ve been looking forward to for a long while.
Why do you want this novel instead of the books you already have? It offers a compelling story, but I do already have a few to read.
Why not just wait until it’s on sale or in paperback? I want to read it now!
Why not just ask for it on PaperBackSwap? It’ll take some time to get it there because it’s such a new release.
Why not just request it at the library? I could do that… it might take a few weeks.
Why not see if one of your friends has picked it up and swap with them when they finish? Even if the library doesn’t have it, one of them might.

And, boom, I’ve got several avenues for reading the book without spending the money. This keeps me from buying a lot of books because my actual need (to read) is fulfilled in other ways for much less cost.

Another example: I’m considering buying a one pound small wheel of Maytag blue cheese at the store.
Why are you buying this cheese? I want to make some good blue cheese burgers and I want some to sprinkle on my salad.
Why are you buying a pound for that? It’s cheaper per ounce.
Why would you let the eight or so ounces you won’t use go to waste? I, uh, wont?
Why not get feta for your salad because it’s cheaper and tastes more appropriate? Hmm… that seems reasonable.
Why not just get a four ounce piece of the blue cheese? …

And there you have it. Instead of buying the one pound chunk, I bought a four ounce chunk and some feta.

In each example, I came up with a result that either made me realize I didn’t really need the item at all or pushed me to another purchase that met my needs for a much lower cost.

The five whys push me there every time. The simple process of thinking through a purchase almost always leads me to a better solution that my first impulse points me to. This saves me money and prevents me from making impulsive, wasteful buys. Instead, I find I have plenty of money left for the things that really do matter in my life.

I have a quick four question quiz for you to run through in your head. Just give your snap response to these – don’t think about each one too much.

What is a wedding supposed to cost?
What is an automobile supposed to cost?
What is a home supposed to cost?
What is a three week vacation for a family of four supposed to cost?

For each of these questions, you came up with a number of some sort. That number is based on your own life experience coupled with what you’ve observed others doing and also the influence that media has had on you. That number, in other words, is your “mental anchor” for what that item should cost – and it’s often the basis of judging whether something is reasonable in price or not.

Of course, anyone who has read The Simple Dollar for long probably recognizes one thing immediately: that anchor price is nothing more than a sticker on the box. It doesn’t represent what you’d ever actually need to or have to pay.

I’ll show you what I mean.

According to CostofWedding.com, the average American couple spends $20,398 on their wedding, and that’s not too far from the mental anchor of the cost of a wedding averaged across all economic levels.

The problem, of course, appears when people begin to truly use the $20,000 figure as a mental anchor for their wedding. “We have to spend that much in order to have even an ‘average’ wedding?” people ask themselves. Then, in order to have their day be ‘special’ or ‘exceptional,’ they spend an amount that’s far over the top, putting them into debt for quite a while.

I’ve witnessed at least two couples do this with their wedding – they invent a mental anchor of what it should cost, chase that mental anchor, and wind up with a gratuitously expensive wedding that ceases to actually make either the bride or groom all that happy in the end.

That same experience repeats itself with cars. After all, there are an awful lot of people out there buying new luxury cars, aren’t there? They have an anchor in their head of what the average is and they must beat that average.

Here’s a novel idea. Forget what your mind is telling you about what things should cost.

Instead, figure out what you actually need (or want) and then strive to minimize the price on that.

So, for example, if you’re thinking of getting married, simply sit down and make a list describing what your wedding will be like. Revise it a bit and make sure both of you are happy with the list. From there, find the best deals you can on each item on the list.

Voila! You’ve created a wedding you’re both happy with and you’re not comparing it to the idea of what a wedding (or wedding cost) should be. Why? Because it doesn’t matter what a wedding “should” cost. It only matters what your wedding costs, and you should strive to maximize the value of your dollar while having the wedding you both want.

The value of something isn’t expressed in dollars. Everything has a cost, but that doesn’t represent the value at all. The value is what you get out of it. Does it make you happy? Does it meet your needs? Those are the things that matter, not matching what someone else is doing.

If you spend all of your time comparing the major things in your life to others based on their cost or their perceived value, you’re saying that what others want is more important to you than what you want. Never let any important choice in your life be governed by what others want.

This is your life. Live it the way you want. Ignore what everyone else says you must have and says you must spend on it. This is about you, not them.

2010 has seen a ton of books released already that I’d love to read, from The Politician by Andrew Young to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. (I happen to be passionate about books, of course – perhaps your passion is films or video games or gadgets or music or something else entirely.)

Five years ago, I would have rushed to the bookstore and picked up these titles in hardback. I would have been completely impatient to read them, so I would have just thrown down the $20 or so, picked up the hardback, and headed home with it. About twenty percent of the time, I would have read the book once, stuck it back on a shelf somewhere, and ignored it as it gathered dust. The other eighty percent of the time, I wouldn’t even have read it before it started gathering dust on the shelf.

Why did I do this? There were several factors – I didn’t have the time I wanted to have to read, for one – but the biggest one was what I like to call the “cult of the new.”

Simply put, the “cult of the new” is the willingness to pay a premium price for whatever the newest releases are. When something new comes out, you’re inordinately focused on it because it’s new. It pops up again and again.

If a new restaurant opens, you have to visit it even if the reviews are mediocre.
If a new book or album comes out, you have to pick it up.
If a new car is released, you can’t help but swing by the dealership to scope it out.

It’s a very expensive routine. You constantly overpay for things in terms of their actual quality – instead, you pay a premium for the “new.” You pay new release prices for DVDs and for film tickets. You pay hardcover prices for books. And, in the end, you get far less for your dollar – or you dig yourself into a financial hole.

Some people do it with some level of social justification – they need to keep up with (or keep ahead of) their friends. To them, I say that if your friends value you only because of what’s on your shelves or where you ate last night, there’s not much depth to the friendship.

Others do it to feel good about themselves, so that they feel current. This is perhaps even more dangerous, because you’re tying your self-esteem and happiness to material things and short-term experiences. Without a constant influx of these things, you begin to feel bad about yourself. True self-worth comes from within, not from external things, and it took me a very long (and painful) time to learn that lesson.

It took me years to break out of the “cult of the new.” Here are some of the things that really helped me.

I adopted a firm rule about buying such new things – I don’t. Excepting gifts for others, I simply don’t buy new releases, period. I don’t pick up books for myself until they’re in paperback. If I do happen to read a hardback I like enough to keep around for multiple readings, I still wait until the paperback comes out.

If I truly must read something that’s brand new, I visit the library. I’m a very heavy user of our local library’s book reservation system. Yes, sometimes I don’t get hot new releases in the first month they’re out. However, I do get them eventually and, quite often, I get them faster than I expect (because other readers check them out for much shorter periods than expected). You can do the same thing with movies – sign up early to rent a new release from Netflix, for example.

I also swap frequently with my friends. If I do receive a book as a gift that I think a friend will like, I loan it out. Similarly, they’ll loan their new releases to me. This way, a new release given to me as a gift is often like two or three of them, since I have friends with which I share interests and can trust in terms of swapping books. One’s social network, if filled with compatible, good people, can be a very valuable resource.

I learned to love exploring the archives. If I find an author I like, for example, it’s much cheaper to dig through his or her older books than it is to charge out and buy the new releases. Take Richard Russo, an author I discoverd a few years ago (and subsequently hooked my mother on). Rather than rushing out and buying myself his newest work in hardback, I used PaperBackSwap to read a multitude of his older novels. The cost for these older books was trivial, but I was still able to deeply and fully enjoy his writing without paying that “new” premium. I explored Douglas Coupland in a very similar fashion.

When I finish a book (or a game, or a movie…), I first turn to my own shelves. I don’t insist on finding the thing I want to read/play/listen to already on my shelf, but quite often I find it anyway. I’ll spy a book that just speaks out to me, saying “read me…” in its own special way. So I pick it up and I suddenly have free entertaiment that I’m deeply enjoying.

Some set of these techniques work no matter which form of the new you’re chasing, whether it’s restaurants or trading cards. Whatever it is, if you can seek out other avenues for your passion than the shiny new thing, you’ll almost always receive a big thank you from your wallet.

When I was a child, I went to the store with enough birthday money in my pocket to buy a new game for my Nintendo. After carefully thinking about the options before me, I whittled my choice down to two video game titles: Rampage and Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest. After hemming and hawing until my mother was getting quite frustrated, I finally settled on Rampage.

I took the game home, played it for an hour, and hated it. I mean, hated it. For some reason, the designers of the game made the choice to give all players infinite lives, which essentially meant that you could never lose. There was no real point to the game.

Even though it was obvious I had picked up a very disappointing game, I tried to make myself believe that it was a good choice. I would make regular attempts to play it. I would coerce my friends into playing it until they begged to play anything else. I even went so far as to play the other game I considered (Castlevania II) at my cousin’s house and tell myself that the game was awful, even though I actually liked that one quite a bit.

Although this is a very extreme example, we all do some form of this at various points in our lives. We buy something. It’s not up to the standards we expected at all. Yet, we want to believe that we didn’t waste our resources, so we try to rationalize the purchase.

I have three observations about post-purchase rationalization from my own life.

It happens much more often with impulse buys than with carefully-planned purchases. Let’s roll back to that video game analogy, above. My game purchase was pretty impulsive. I didn’t have access to a wide range of reviews of the two games. In fact, I mostly made the purchase on the spur of the moment. My choice resulted from remembering a fun afternoon at an arcade with my cousin in which we played several games of Rampage together. Today, I make most of my purchases in a vastly different way. I usually research the choices into oblivion. I read reviews. I ask myself if I really need this item and, if I do, whether or not this particular item gives me adequate bang for my buck. That doesn’t mean I’m immune to impulse buys. They strike me still with some regularity, most often in a bookstore or in a grocery store. Sometimes I’ll be happy with my choice; at other times, I’ll read the book or consume the item and feel pretty disappointed.

I often try to forget about those poor purchases. Rather than thinking about them, I usually try to sweep them under the rug. I’ll toss out the remainder of an awful food item just to get it out of my eye. I’ll quickly trade away a disappointing book. My method for “rationalization” of those purchases often comes in the form of simply getting them out of my sight – and thus, often, out of my mind.

When I can’t get rid of the purchase, I usually try to “break” it. I don’t mean that I attempt to smash the item or anything. Instead, I try to use it heavily to force the item to either prove itself or to fail in some distinctive way so that I have a reason to replace it. Think kitchen items, for example; if I buy a knife that doesn’t “click,” I’ll try using it all the time until I discover a true use for it or I discover so many flaws that it’s replace-worthy. In its own way, this is a justification mechanism, as I’m forcing myself to either justify the purchase or justify a replacement for it.

These three observations lead straight to a few solutions to keep post-purchase rationalization from ever becoming an issue.

First, simply curb those impulse buys. Instead, write down the item and research it a bit. If you still want it and can still afford it, buy it later on. Walk away from it, though, if you don’t know anything about it other than what’s on the shiny packaging.

Second, if an item doesn’t work for you, admit it. Don’t try to beat yourself up over it, or stubbornly use it while making a mess of everything else (which can often happen with a kitchen implement, for example). If you made a mistake, admit that you made a mistake. Then, ask yourself how to deal with that mistake.

Finally, once you recognize the mistake, focus on a good solution for it. Can you trade away the item for something you actually will use? Does the item still have resale value? Turn that mistake into something more positive by quickly turning it into some form of a gain in your life. For example, if I read a book I don’t like, I almost always trade it away quickly on PaperBackSwap and then get a book that I will enjoy. This way, I at least wind up getting some value for the money I spent.

Don’t rationalize your mistakes. Instead, face them and look for ways to improve on your choices. A mistake is an opportunity to improve yourself.