Growing up somewhat poor, I learned the hard lesson of deferred gratification. It may be hard to recall now, but that’s what we called saving up for something and then buying it with cash. In the old days, credit cards didn’t exist. In fact, the first credit cards didn’t even come along until the year I was born, 1958.
I admit that I have credit cards. I have two or three and I can pretty much buy anything I really want at any time, even a car. But I still like the idea of deferred gratification. So, rather than buy something on credit, I’ll save for most or all of it first, then plunk down the credit card to buy it. A couple days later or when the next statement rolls around, I pay it off since I had already saved the bulk of the money.
Fair enough. But there’s another part of deferred gratification that I learned a long time ago from my friend Cathy. We would be shopping and she would lay her eyes on something. I would say, “Why don’t we just buy it? We have the money.” and she would reply, “Because I’m not through wanting it yet.”
What a cool concept: not being through wanting it yet. I liked it so much that I still do it. I’ve learned not to impulse buy. If anything is over an arbitrary limit I’ve set, I have to spend some time wanting it first. Right now, the limit is about $100. Sometimes it’s been $25, other times $50. It’s my “I Want It Now Limit”.
If it’s over this limit, then I have to go through wanting it first. And so I wait. I have done this many times in my life. I remember really wanting a leather jacket at one point. It was about $275 or so. It was over my $50 get it now threshold at the time. So I would look at leather jackets endlessly. For more than two years I roamed the stores, looking for “the” jacket that would allow me to go from wanting it to buying it.
Finally, the day came. It was the perfect jacket. I had almost settled on others before this, but I was so glad I waited for “the” jacket. I had already saved the money, so buying it at any point along the way would have been fine. But I wasn’t through wanting it yet.
Sure, I have violated this general rule from time to time. And each time I’ve come to regret it. For example, I dropped $50 on a soft ice cream maker. I still haven’t been able to successfully make soft ice cream with it. It is on the borderline of regret as I write this.
The same has been true of most of the cars I have purchased. As you know, I don’t like cars and they don’t like me. And I’ve ended up with some real clunkers, largely because I needed a car, rather than wanted a car.
This is the case of the Black Widow, a refugee from the pretend marriage. It was the consolation prize, I guess. Over the last weekend, I considered getting a new car, well, a new SUV. Times are good in the writing business right now and I could afford a reasonable payment. And I would trade in the Black Widow, which was still worth a fair amount of coin.
I found some real beauties out there. At one point I almost jumped in the Widow and drove to the lot to look at a Ford Edge in Vero Beach. And then it occurred to me. I wasn’t through wanting a new car yet. The Widow still had some good miles left on her, and there was no big rush. I could enjoy the wanting it stage a little longer.
I think that’s the true beauty of the idea of “But I’m not through wanting it yet.” For me, I have learned to enjoy the wanting stage almost as much as the owning stage. If I wait long enough, I have found that a lot of my wants never turn into buys. While I’m convinced at the moment that I really want something, I later find out I didn’t. Often, I even forget about the thing I wanted altogether.
I only wish I could have learned this in my relationships. There’s a big difference between wanting to be with someone and wanting to close the deal. Because I never placed any random limitations on relationships, like the $100 plateau on impulse buying, I have often said screw it to the wanting it stage and just going for it. And when I get it, I wonder what they hell I was going to do with it.
I’m sure you know this feeling. You see something in the kitschy retail establishment in Key West that you just have to have. You can’t get it out of your mind. So you decide that you’re on vacation and that you can’t afford the luxury of just wanting, you have to buy. So you do. “It’s perfect,” you say. A couple months or years later, you wonder what the hell ever possessed you to invest in this albatross you now have in your life. So, you trash it, thinking it was a total waste of time, money and energy.
Why? Because you never went through the “But I’m Not Through Wanting It Yet” stage. If you had, you would have come back from Key West and life would continue on just as it always had. And you’d never have to go through buyer’s remorse.
I think more of us should have the “But I’m Not Through Wanting It Yet” philosophy in life. It would help us realize that just because we want something, it doesn’t mean we should get it. That goes for kitschy crap we pick up in Key West, new jobs, new loves and new places to live. We often just plow right in and go for it, without really wanting it.
Unfortunately, making a return on some of these items is damned hard, often very costly and occasionally impossible. If only we had been happy wanting it instead.
Out on the Treasure Coast, waiting for the UPS guy to come (hey, it was under $50),
– Robb