Needs vs. Wants

But it is on sale?

I cannot tell you how many times I have heard that. We need to start looking at it differently. Just because something is on sale does not mean it is something we need. My wife made a good point just the other day when we were talking. We had been discussing my last blog post, Coupons? Yeah – Right!,  when she said she did not like coupons either. One reason she gave was that sometimes with coupons, you need to buy other things that you do not need at full price in order to be able to use the coupon.

When I look at needs and wants, I see the same dilemma. If I go to the store because I need one pair of jeans, how many times are there signs in the store that say if you buy one pair, you can get a second pair for half off?

Needs are things we have to have in order to survive. For me, that means, food, clothing, and shelter. I tend to add a fourth one to the list. That one is transportation. The reason I add that one is because even if you are using public transportation to get to a job, it ends up being a need so that you can keep your job. Bicycles, motorcycles, skateboards, and any other form of transportation is needed for a certain distance.

Wants are things we would like to have that do not fall into the categories listed above. I want a new car, but, I will continue to drive my 2000 Toyota Corolla which I bought from my mother and still has under 100k miles on it. It is paid for and the maintenance has been really cheap to this point. Mainly tires, brakes and oil changes. My wife and I want a house but for now, the rental we are in is working out well. When the time is right, we will look at purchasing a home of our own again. It took a while to get rid of the old homes we had.

When we talk about needs, it is important to define some of those as well. We all need food to survive. I remember a time when I was in the military. I had gone out partying and blew my whole check in a week. I had eight days to go before I got paid again and there was no food in the apartment. I was already getting extra pay for not eating off the base so I could not eat there. I ended up borrowing money from someone before I got paid. It was a hard lesson in major interest. From that point on, I always made sure that I had two loaves of bread, peanut butter and jelly and some kind of drink mix in the house so that I wasn’t always drinking water.

I told every one of my kids the story and encouraged them to make sure they always had those things too. They add Ramon Noodles to the list. Doing this, I made sure that I would always have some food in the house. Sure, it sucks to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for breakfast, lunch and dinner but the alternative is to go without food.

Clothing is something we need so that we do not get arrested for indecent exposure. We do not need 25 pairs of shoes no matter how hard we try to justify it. We can save some money by shopping for clothing items at Good Will, Salvation Army or garage sales. It just does not make much sense to spend extra money on clothes if we cannot pay the bills on time.

Finally, there is shelter. This is a hard one because no one wants to live in a location that is unsafe or where there are health hazards within the house or apartment. However, living in something you cannot afford is not recommended either. Many people realized this when the housing bubble burst. How many people lost their homes because the value went to half of what they paid for it? If you look at what was going on, people thought that credit was unlimited. They were taking equity loans out on their homes and putting their families in jeopardy. I am renting right now because we recently moved to a new area. My wife and I each had a house before we were married. It took a long time to sell them. Years in fact. We can afford to rent the place we are in now. It is nice but we would not get into something that was over a certain amount so that we could look like we were doing better than we are. That is called keeping up with the Jones’. You can read about that in my post Unfriend Mr. & Mrs. Jones.

There is always room to move up. Watch what you spend, pay your bills on time, eliminate your debt. When those things are gone, you will find out how much extra money there is in your life and will be able to get some of those things you want. Take care of your needs. The rest will come in time.