Saving for the Kitchen Gadgets and Appliances you want

This year has been a big learning year for me in terms of money. I’ve discovered that through different means such as visualising and planning I can get most things I want. Let me tell you a bit more.

We all CRAVE some sort of kitchen gadget (or something else! new headphones, a new phone, maybe even a new computer or playstation). Sometimes the prices seem excessive. But we read the reviews and we KNOW we still want that item. It’s what we want. End of the conversation with ourselves.

Let’s face it we’ve all been there. We’ve bought cheap and regretted it. I use to buy cheap kitchen mixers and with the amount of use they use to get they’d last months (one even lasted weeks!). So I researched it and found the mixer I wanted. It looked the way I wanted it, it done everything I needed it to, it was perfect. But how to get it! (BTW it was the Sage Appliances Bakery Boss.) (Not an ad, it’s just fantastic and I highly recommend it!).

How Did I get it?

Well I saved a few pictures of it on my phone. I bookmarked the link and a few reviews to it. (Love reading reviews!). That allowed me to focus on it. Keep going back to it, checking it and wanting it even more.

The second thing I done was start planning. How can I afford this mixer at nearly £400. It seemed a lot of money. Planning was key here. So I done a budget calculation using this fab little budget planner on Pigly. I’m also a big fan of their mortgage calculator too which I used but that’s another story. Best yet it’s all free! Just a tool. So I put all my figures in and seen where money was leaking out of my spending. It’s all in dollars but that doesn’t make a matter at all.

This introduced me to a new view on my money. Needs, Wants and Savings. According to experts we should stick within recommended percentages of our income for those separate categories. Soon you see how low your Needs really are and how high your Wants are. This allowed me to see how much I could potentially save each month if i cut some of my Wants. A short sacrifice on some wants for a few months to achieve a bigger value want (the mixer). And it worked. I got the mixer!

Set a Goal!

Without a goal post you’ll miss the target. Don’t be wishy washy about it. Set a goal of when you want something by. It will help you visualise that you’ve already got it all planned. Don’t put too long a timeframe either or you’ll lose interest in it altogether. But be realistic on what you can save each month.

Johnny from OneStepForward puts it so perfectly in the below paragraph taken from his post on Get What You Want.

“You need to take into account the amount of money that you will need for the thing that you want, your income and when exactly you want it by, and this is where your budget comes in. In order to realistically get something you want you really need to set a timeframe for it, because the risk is that if you save over too long a period of time you will lose interest in your goal and will most likely face some sort of setback. One great way to manage your budget is to set up automatic transfers or payments from your accounts when you get paid, this way you will save a set amount and have a set amount left over after any bills.”

From https://onestep4ward.com/get-what-you-want/

The Simple Dollar also talks about how to save up for a ‘Strategic Splurge‘ which is definitely a term I am going to use from now on when I want to buy something expensive!! 🙂 One of their tips which I use religiously now when saving is to create a standing order from my bank account to my savings account on payday. It all happens automatically then and sometimes before you’ve even woken up on payday the money is already moved. Remove that thinking and it will just happen. You can also adjust that standing order easily to acomodate some additional spending for that ‘Strategic Splurge’

So that’s how I now afford nice things. Save!

If this helps even one person I will feel that taking the time to write this has been well used! 🙂