The battle between personal wants and needs is a hard one, made even harder by the constant bombardment of media advertising we receive each day. Not-so-special offers, visions of the perfect lifestyle and the infamous ‘Keeping with the Jones’ all contribute towards some ill-advised purchasing decisions. Here is a list of My Top 10 things people waste money on:

 

1. Gym Membership

You see them through the windows every January, working hard with the bright lights blazing and high tempo music roaring. Come past in April and the place is near deserted. Clearly something must be working well for all these people to have achieved their fitness goals in just 3 months… right?! Or perhaps more likely is that they’ve forgotten or given up on the regular gym visit. The 4 weekly trips go down to a single monthly visit and our gym-goer ends up paying £25 per visit.

Gyms love re-occuring memberships because they know full well that people sign up in a state of mild euphoria, images floating in their heads of their soon-to-be perfect body. Eventually the reality of wet evenings and cold mornings put a stop to many people’s gym visits.

2. Storage

If you’re paying for storage.. chances are that you don’t need the items it contains. I’ll admit; I have used paid storage once before when I was moving between rented houses and the previous tenants refused to leave on time causing me to have to move in with the gf’s family for a month. In that case there wasn’t the physical room for my things at her parent’s, all of the possessions would be coming with me to the new house and there was a set time period for storage requirement.

I read a BBC news article last year that stated many people end up paying storage costs which far exceed the value of the items they’re storing. The article quoted someone as saying they’ve had the same sofa in a storage locker for 10 years now.. even though a new equivalent sofa would only cost a few hundred to buy and the storage costs were many times this per year. Madness.

The other point worth considering is that if you’re having to regularly use storage just for daily items.. you perhaps have too much stuff. Aside from Christmas decorations and very occasional use items (camping equipment, ski jackets, an old megaphone from my student protesting days) we have a household rule that nothing else goes up in the loft or hidden out in the garage. If it aint used in a year, we don’t really need it and it can be sold.

3. New Electronics

Ever seen those long queues at the Apple store they show in TV occasionally whenever a new iPhone comes out? Next time it happens, take a look at the people waiting and count how many of them are busy tagging themselves in the queue whilst on an iPhone. What happened to their previous iPhones that these people would want to rush out and buy a brand new model? And if their previous iPhone had such poor performance that it needs replacing as soon as possible.. why are they so desperate to buy another one from the same company?!

We all know their old phone works perfectly fine, continues to make calls texts and internet browsing. Heck, even the people queueing up to throw away half a grand on a luxury device know their old phones work just fine. And yet; there they are, desperate to throw away their still perfectly-working device for another slightly faster or bigger.

It’s the same with games consoles. I’ve got an xbox 360 I bought off ebay for £50 a few years ago. I buy games 2nd hand with a strict spending limit of £3 maximum per game, and this often gets me all the blockbuster titles a few years after release. Do these games suddenly become bad games just because they’re a few years old? Hell no. So why then rush out to buy the newest consoles and releases when you almost certainly still have a huge backlog of awesome games to play from the past several years.

4. Fancy Kitchen Gadgets

Whether it be a bread maker that has only every been used twice or an apple corer still in it’s original packaging.. we’ve all got these things lying around the kitchen somewhere. Indeed it was TheFireStarter who mentioned his shame at some of these pointless purchases recently and I’ll admit to having done the same!

Often, when you factor in the time and cost of purchasing these gadgets designed to save us time and money.. they become the exact opposite. My old favourite was a mozzarella ball slicer; you put the ball in, pulled it down and ended up with several perfect slices in seconds. Sounds great! Until you came to clean the damn thing. No matter how hard I tried, it was always impossible to actually get every bit of cheese out of the tight slicing blades. I must have wasted hours of my life trying to clean that damn things and all so I could save a few seconds from manually cutting the slices.

5. Bottled Water

It comes (almost) free out of the tap! Stop buying bottled water! Unless of course you genuinely dislike the taste of tap water and absolutely insist on indulging this ridiculous luxury… Ermine… ;)

6. Premixed drinks

I recall this being a big thing over in Australia while I was there, and in the years since I’ve seen it become bigger and bigger here in the UK. Premixed alcoholic drinks with all sorts of combinations are appearing in supermarkets, usually in cans but a few in large ‘sharing’ sizes. They can range as anything from Vodka & Coke to an extremely poor imitation of a Pina colada. A quick scan over the ingredients and you’ll see you’re paying a 500%+ markup on the cost of what is just coke and spirit.

Often I also see these premixed drinks sold in multipacks for a value which would allow someone to just buy an entire bottle of the spirit + mixer outright.

7. Branded Medicine

What’s the difference between a 17p pack of Tesco’s own brand paracetamol and a £2.99 pack of premium branded paracetamol? Bugger all. The great thing about medicine and package labelling here in the UK is that you can clearly see on every pack exactly what chemically-identical ingredients go into the packet… and yet people still pay huge markups on items exactly the same. My partner used to work for a large medicine seller in the UK and she will happily tell you of the time they went on a site visit to one of the production factories. Here, paracetamol and other basic painkillers were sliding down a chute before being funnelled off into 2 separate lines for packaging.. one the own brand and another the premium brand.

Perhaps there is a slight Placebo effect people gain from using the premium branded medicines, but are you willing to pay several times more just for a Placebo? No thanks.

8. Microwave Meals

Some items on this list do have a genuine place for even the frugal consumer to fit in. Microwave meals should be purchased purely for portability and where no time has been spare for preparation, perhaps as an alternative to going out for lunch while at work or when genuinely strapped for time in the evenings. What they should not be used for is daily regular use while at home!

My old housemate used to be addicted to microwave meals. Every evening without fail he would load up on 2 trays of food (because 1 of those meals really isnt enough for an adult), blast it for 5 minutes in the box and then carry it up to his room. Ironically this was the same housemate who would regularly be late with his rent payments as he didn’t have the cash spare right now.

Microwave meals are not just expensive but also incredibly bad for you. Frequently topped up with sugar and salt to add some flavour and high in fats.. It’s not just your wallet taking a hit from frequent use of these.

9. Any Pet ‘Luxuries’

We’re a nation of animal lovers and it’s no surprise that people always want to go out and purchase the best for their pets. Everything from toys to beds and pet litter will have a dazzling selection of items all at various prices and perceived luxuriousness. However does it really matter to your cat that you’ve just spent £40 on a big fancy scratch-post-jungle-gym type device.. or will they just as happily rip up your carpet? The expensive automated moving toy mouse or a nearby ball of wool? Animals don’t care how much you spend on something, they’ll go for what they like and what they like is often just random household objects lying around. I’ve seen cats play for hours with nothing more than a cardboard box and pen lid to bat around.

10. Debt which charges interest

Last but not least is debt which charges interest. Payday loans, credit cards, bank overdrafts or any other form of borrowing you’ve used to purchase non-essential items. By paying for it on debt, you’re effectively paying a far higher cost just for the benefit of having that item immediately. There’s really no excuse for paying any interest on debt generated by purchasing luxury items, just wait a bit.. save the money instead and buy it outright a bit later.

 

That’s my top 10 list of items people waste money on. I’ve admitted to some myself, will you do the same? And are there any obvious ones you’d add to the list? Let us know in the comments below.

 

PS: If you havn’t already, check out the new EarlyRetirementGuys Forum. We’ve already had some great discussions started and it would be awesome for more people to become involved.