This has often happened to me, and I have no doubt that you all have faced this numerous times in your life. When you go shopping, with a grocery list, or without it, you end up buying much more than that and probably the stuff you never needed or wanted to have.
You were lured into the trap of fancy marketing, that big Yello tag with Red writing saying 75% off, and you couldn't stop yourself from buying that. You thought you saved 75% of the money, but actually, you lost 25% of your money on something you never wanted in the first place.
What is that impulse?
This is the impulse that comes with your paychecks and bank accounts. If you are recently paid, if you got your paycheck recently, chances are you already want to spend it and of course, with some fancy advertisements, you got lured in.
The average cost of food per month for one person ranges somewhere between $150 to $300, depending on age and size of household. For some, it's around $600, for others it's well under $200. However, these national averages vary based on where you live and the quality of your food purchases.
Let's assume the average Grocery bill you pay every month is $400 keeping all factors in and assuming you have a small household.
Research from the University of Pennsylvania shows that people who can avoid impulse spending can save up to 23% on their grocery bills.
Let's do some calculations with $400 of your bill and 23% of savings. That's around $92 of impulse spending, which is almost $1104 annually. This is some serious amount of money going to waste just because we saw that fancy advertisement and bought something that we never needed.
Americans can save 23% or roughly $1100 of their money by sticking to the grocery list, while another statistic shows that Canadians with a family of four could potentially save over $2,600 by just sticking to the Grocery list.
