Saturday, November 26, 2011

Black Friday Shopping

So, did you go shopping on Black Friday this year? In my last post, I shared my thoughts on how we might begin to look at Thanksgiving as a day for hitting one’s financial restart button. Were you able to resist the temptation of the Black Friday sales?

Despite my own post the other day, I have to admit that even I struggled a bit. WalMart had a nice deal on a digital camera and I had been thinking about purchasing one for quite some time. There were also other deals like a handful of appliances going for as little as $3.00. I really had to think about my motives for wanting to buy that camera and the appliances. What I found was that the lure of being part of the crowd was the only real impulse pushing me to buy. I did not need the camera, I merely wanted it, and I wanted the appliances only because they were dirt cheap.
 
For some families, Black Friday is indeed part of a tradition. It is in fact a time when they get together to wait in lines as a family. Shopping for them is as much a bonding experience as the Thanksgiving holiday itself. But for me, Black Friday is purely about consumerism, the lifestyle that I am learning to do away with. So, I didn’t go shopping yesterday despite the temptation.

What I am also realizing about Black Friday is that it is beginning to have no limits. Black Friday doesn’t start on Friday anymore. Perhaps when the trend happens online, it is less invasive to disrupting traditional family time. Amazon, for example, began holding its Black Friday specials not too soon after Halloween this year. That wasn’t so bad. When WalMart announced that it would begin its holiday sales on Thanksgiving Day, it felt like the retailing giant and all its counterparts who followed had taken things too far. I respect Kmart for keeping its hours reasonable this year despite its competition with WalMart and others. It is possible for a business to be successful without merely giving lip service to their commitment to families and communities.

Did you go shopping on Black Friday this year? Or on Thanksgiving Day? Please share your story. I would really love to know what everyone thinks about this sense of consumerism encroaching more and more on all of our holidays. New Year’s Day seems to be the last holiday not tied to some sort of mandatory shopping frenzy. What are your thoughts?

Thursday, November 24, 2011

Pushing the Financial Reset Button a Little Earlier This Year


People have a great tendency to overspend during the holidays. Sometimes the spending takes the form of buying gifts for others. Other times the spending comes from a lack of discipline during a time when all the outer stimuli in the world says, “Buy, buy, buy!” It’s hard to stand up to that sort of social and societal pressure. Then on top of it all, spending behavior rather than saving behavior is encouraged for three long months, from the end of October to the start of the new year.

Too often it is not until the new year starts that people have the opportunity to breathe and escape the pressures of encouraged spending behaviors. It doesn’t have to be that way. You can push the restart button on your spending and finances any time of the year. And for those feel that they need a milestone holiday or event to help them jumpstart their saving behavior rather than spending behavior, they can look to a holiday like Thanksgiving for help.

Thanksgiving is all about family and friends. It’s all about caring for and being thankful for what little we have. Even millionaires do not own the world and they can be thankful for what little part of it they do have just as the beggar can be thankful for what he has received. More so than New Year’s Day is it a grand opportunity to resolve to reduce one’s spending and put first what is most important in one’s life, those things that we acquire without money and that all the spending in the world could not buy us.

Rather than wait until January 1st to make yet another resolution that will be hard to keep, begin your commitment to being a saver rather than a spender on the last Thursday in November, Thanksgiving Day. Start the habit to save just at the point every year when you're tempted to begin spending the most.

Black Friday doesn't have to be the retailer's Christmas. You can take the day back and reclaim it as a day to save. Even if you do go shopping, you can make conscious decisions about how much you will spend and when you will spend it without being cajoled by the marketplace into believing that you have no real alternatives. Take the holiday season back a little earlier this year and begin on Thanksgiving Day to refocus and reset your spending. Go into the new year with money in the bank and a different resolution that will keep you prosperous all year. 

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!