A Money-Saving Heuristic

I am a user of some big ticket items. And since big ticket items often have big ticket accessories, expenses can rapidly pile up, resulting in a drain on critical financial reserves. To avoid this, I took a good look at my personal desires for an item. The problem with decision making is that just about everything looks desirable, especially if it's sold at a lower than normal price. Hence, some rules need to be in place.

In order to select the highest priority purchase, I would ask whether the item is necessary. That is, it fulfills some kind of want/need. These are ranked in order of how I order my own hierarchy of needs/wants. I ask myself whether I will use the item immediately. It's pretty obvious if an item is non-essential, since it is a nice-to-have-sometime-in-the-future (a safety net item like a first aid kit, for example, is excluded from this consideration). A yes to this bumps the item up the list. Then I ask myself whether I will use the item often (beyond the new item syndrome window period). While difficult to honestly and accurately answer for sure, a yes to this would bump the item further up the list. Then comes the question of whether the item is at an affordable price bracket. Technically, just about everything that isn't obscenely expensive is actually "affordable", so the only real gauge would be to weigh the item (at price-value) against other items (even if dissimilar) according to the price-value.

If a list of items is tabulated according to that heuristic, a reasonably objective comparison can be made against one another. Thus, it becomes easier to decide between having 300 units of enjoyment item A vs 1 unit of high enjoyment item B. To be sure, just about every item is non-essential. One needs surprisingly little to survive, and very few items are true "essentials". However, to live a reasonably enjoyable life, some luxuries are called for. Most things that we spend on are luxuries anyway. However, going by the heuristic helps eliminate most of the nice-to-haves, and actually maximize utility by ensuring that items spent on will actually be enjoyed.

A further consideration would be cannibalization of utility, since having increasing luxuries actually reduces one's utility of other (usually older) luxuries. Should something fail muster in this analysis, it's a good indication to pawn them off. By that logic...that includes most of the items in my room. =p