I was a born packrat, had to have “my stuff” all the time. I stored it, stacked it, hid it, you name it. Now, after 6 years of moving (Navy husband), and continuous reading of decluttering sites (FLYlady.net especially) and watching CleanSweep… it’s like a magic switch has been flipped in my brain. I pride myself in how little I can have or use. I see “the least” as a challenge. Simplification has become a goal in itself, not just “control the clutter” or “find somewhere to put stuff”. I’m not very eloquent, I know, but really the mental shift is huge.

Keep trying, keep focussing on the effort, and somewhere along the way the shift will come.

Of course it is. But how do you learn to do this? (Heh, this is kind of like saying “Buy low, sell high” as the key to successful investing. Or plastics.)

How do you change a mindset? I guess once the savings account actually reaches a useful size, the hoarding compulsion and greed will kick in. “No, I don’t want to go to Starbucks! I’ll take that Frappuccino and put in savings. mineminemineminemineallmine.”

No snark intended, J.D. You are doing a great job on this site and I really appreciate the variety of topics you put up. Two enthusiastic thumbs up!

I think that the point the article tries (and possibly fails) to make is that it’s easy to fall into the trap that “other people have X, and so I want it too”. Or that sometimes people feel good when they have the latest widget (an XBox 360, say), and it becomes a sort of status thing. One effective way to counter this is to adopt the opposite line of thought: “I don’t have the latest X, and the people who are buying it would be better off saving their money.” I don’t think it’s something that ought to be overtly expressed. Reverse snobbery is just as lame as real snobbery.

As for “shopping without buying”: I don’t take a newspaper, so don’t have the luxury of browsing the ads, which is probably a good thing. As you say, it’s fine to be satisfied with a deal, as long as it’s a purchase that you needed to make anyhow.

Have you ever read Andrew Tobias’ thing about stocking up on toilet paper? Funny stuff, but he makes a good point.

Reverse snobbery doesn’t do it for me. If somebody buys something nice, more power to them. I guess I’m not wired for envy, at least not for material goods. I think the fact that I know that I can afford to buy stuff, but make a conscious choice not to buy it, is satisfying enough for me.

Frankly, I don’t get the “shopping without buying” concept. I scour the Sunday newspaper supplements every week. That’s pretty much my equivalent of shopping without buying. If I see something on sale that I was going to buy anyway, I write it down. Then I go buy it, knowing that I’ve got a good deal. Then I go home, happy and satisfied that I got a good deal. Buying something I didn’t plan do buy only spoils the deal. I stock up on consumables when it’s cheap, then don’t think about it until I start to run low. Then I look at Sunday ads for a few weeks until I see a sale that I like. Note that I don’t stock up on tech stuff (RAM, blank DVDs, USB flash drives) because that *always* gets cheaper in the long run.