4 Easy Ways to Overcome Instant Gratification

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This is a guest post by Justin Tillman, who writes about self-improvement at the Theuncommonlife.net.

Due to e-commerce and the dot com boom, people are bombarded with more offers and advertising on a daily basis than our parents ever saw growing up. There are a countless amount of situations that will come up in our lives that will bring us to a point where we will have to make a financial decision.

Should I buy this new car?
Should I purchase this T.V. on a credit card?
Should I buy this furniture set with 0 % financing for 6 months?

The conscious or unconscious decisions that we make today will ultimately impact and dictate the financial lives we will live in the future. One of the main differences that separates the rich and poor is the rich have the ability to delay gratification while the poor are heavily influenced by the whim of instant gratification.

What is Instant Gratification?

Instead of saving financially and preparing for the future, the mind set of instant gratification is “I want it and I want it now”. You get a surge of adrenaline that makes you feel ALIVE!! You have built up a belief in your mind that by making this purchase, your dreams and desires will become fulfilled. Rationalization jumps straight out the window and all you can think about is feeding that impulse. You become obsessed by this reoccurring thought that life will never be the same again, so naturally you get it. And for a small brief moment in time you have fulfilled a need and gotten your fix.

People unconsciously give into the mindset of instant gratification, because it takes little discipline and a credit card is very easy to obtain. Even when a person tells themselves they will only use it for emergencies or for things they really need, temptation and want takes over the majority of the time and unconsciously instant gratification comes into play.

As soon as you start to negatively use your credit due to getting lured by the sweet sound of low monthly payments, debt and interest will begin to compound against you. Each time you make a decision to purchase something without thinking about the cost, you suffer from the opportunity cost of losing money in which you could have made, if you had consciously reallocated the money more wisely.

What I am talking about comes from two examples, I will show you one now and other in the delayed gratification section.[J1]

Example #1:

Imagine a recent college grad, who lands his first job. He finally starts making some decent cash and begins to think about what he should do with all, that dough. Instant Gratification, is feeding into the idea that by purchasing a brand new car it will show that he has upgraded his status. So he goes to a local dealership and finds that new shinny car, puts down a $2,500 down payment on a $25,000 loan at 7.5% with a $450 monthly payment for 5 years and buys the car.

This seems pretty rational to most people, who don’t know what to do with their money after recently getting out of school. However, when you understand the opportunity cost of money, you will see why this is not a good thing to do.

Keeping that example in mind let’s move on to Delayed Gratification.

What is Delayed Gratification?

Unlike instant gratification, delayed gratification is a conscious choice.

Delayed Gratification, is like your own personal lottery ticket. By saving your money and getting whatever it is that you wanted at the time of a later date. You wisely side step debt traps and you properly allocate your time, money and resources into indentifying ways to reap the benefits of compounding interest in your favor.

Delayed gratification was big before the depression as people worked hard for their money and didn’t spend it feverously. Yes, there was credit but the majority of the people that took out store credit paid it back in either short term payments or all at once.

Example # 2

Let’s pick another student in with same type of income in the car buying scenario. Delayed gratification would be, instead of using that 2,500 for a down payment. She uses that as the purchase money to buy a starter car. She then decides to invest the $450 into a mutual fund yielding 10% for the same 5 year period. At the end of 5 years, she would have just over $40,000 to play with. If she wanted she could then go buy that same car for $25,000 in cash and still have $15,000 left to reinvest.

Wow! What a different outcome with the same exact dollars starting off. Decisions like this one among many are the thought process which separates the rich from the poor.

Four Ways to Overcome Instant Gratification

1) Fast Your Spending in Blocks

The idea here is not to make a single purchase, for a blocked out period of time, outside of your spending necessities and your planned purchases.

Honestly the way this started for me was because I am not a detail oriented person. And I personally hate tracking my expenses daily, so I was opposed to going through the pain of manually tracking my expenses daily. I just stopped all together with the habit of spending anything during the week day. Then as time progress, I went from a week to two weeks to a month.

This made tracking very easy for me because the only thing I had to track we’re my weekly necessities which became predictable. And for the purchases I did make, they decreased substantially because I had enough time to think about whether or not I really needed it and generally, I didn’t.

2) Make a Note

The idea is to carry a small note pad with you. Before you ever consider making an impulsive decision to buy, Stop! And write down what you want and give it a week’s time before making the decision to buy. Then, revisit the list. This works in perfect harmony when you go on a spending fast.

You can also make digital shopping list too. For instance, I love purchasing books on Amazon. Whenever I was introduced to a new book, I would automatically order, click then buy. But once I received the book, I quickly found myself with a lot of books I never started.

Now, instead of buying right away, I will just add a book to my wish list which is very long. I probably have over a 100 books there now, that I have still yet to order.

If you find a way to take fake actions like putting something in a pre order process like a wish list, you’ll be amazed at how quickly you can lose interest in buying something if you procrastinate buying something for a week, 2 week or more.

This may seem trivial to do this with little items, but as time passes you will observe yourself becoming much more powerful with your buying decisions for larger items.

3) Track Your Spending

As I stated before, I absolutely hate tracking my expenses on a daily basis, however, what I have found that works for me is that tracking expenses is much easier when you can do it on a weekly basis as long as you can commit to fasting your spending on a weekly basis. If you don’t fast, a weekly basis will not work.

When you can track your financial history, it makes you the captain of your ship. It allows you to navigate where you are now heading.

4) What Motivates You?

Before embarking on the journey of becoming better at delaying gratification, it’s important to understand why you want to be more attentive with your finances in the first place.

Some of my financial motivations are to help my dad retire from the 9 to 5 grind, have a home in two countries, and have enough to pay for my daughter’s college education.

What do you want? Do you have any idea how much it will cost for you to retire young? Pay for your wedding? Go on a 3 month sabbatical with just your girlfriend or spouse? What are some of things important is that to you? Then ask yourself is that more important than the brand new car or shinny new widget today?

What are some other methods that you use to help you overcome instant gratification?

This article was written by Justin Tillman, who writes about self-improvement at the Theuncommonlife.net. There you can pick up a copy of his free e-book: Find Your Purpose in 20 Minutes or Less. His goals are to inspire others to unleash their burning desires and to live life on their terms. If you liked this article, you may also enjoy one of his top articles on motivation: What is Motivation and Where Do Find It?