Your emotions are expensive, according to a professional spending coach.
Paige Pritchard, the Texas-based founder of the online community Overcoming Overspending, recently posted a video to her TikTok to share her tips on how to keep impulse buying at bay.
The content creator said that the purpose of her 3½-minute clip — which was posted on March 8 and has since garnered more than 500,000 views — is to “de-influence you out of buying things you don’t need,” she explained.
She said that underneath the desire for a new object is a deeper desire for an unmet emotional need.
“So when you buy the product, you’re not actually buying the product. I mean, you are, but you’re not really buying the product for the product,” she told her followers.
‘You’re either buying yourself an identity or a feeling. Because when it boils down to it, that’s all you really want,” she said.
“You want to identify as a certain type of person — and you want to feel a certain type of way.”
Pritchard brought up the example of someone who purchases a leather-bound planner. She said the shopper’s desire is less about the item itself and more about wanting to identify as an organized person who has control over their life.
She also offered the example of someone who buys anti-aging cream.
“You’re not actually buying the anti-aging cream — what you’re buying is confidence,” she explained.
She said when people buy a green drink, it’s not the beverage they’re buying but the identity of “somebody who values their health and wants to take care of it.”
She said realizing a true desire can help one examine purchases — not through a “product lens” but through “a mental and emotional lens.”
She said advertising is meant to activate a consumer’s emotions and make them feel like they have a need.
“Advertising is actually trying to sell you either the promise of an identity or the future promise of an emotion,” she explained.
She said that’s why people don’t really know they’re watching a perfume commercial until the very end: Advertisers realize the ad is “not actually about the perfume.”
Instead, the commercial “evokes an emotional experience in you that you will then associate to the perfume.”
She said once people come to understand the true origin of their desires, they can ask themselves two questions:
- “What identity do I think that this product is either gonna give me or reinforce?”
- “What emotion am I really trying to buy by making this purchase?”
Instead of buying the product, she said, people can ask themselves how they can give themselves the emotion or identity they are hoping the product will produce for them.
Pritchard said that this check-in practice helped her save a “ton of money” in her own life.
The Post reached out to Pritchard for comment.
Her followers thanked her for her insights.
“The concept of buying for the fantasy self changed everything for me in terms of buying habits,” one person wrote.
“Feelings! The high of the purchase and finding ‘the best deal!’ I’m a chronic returner because after a day or two, I realize I don’t really want it,” another said.
“Bingo! You are buying a lifestyle and/or an experience!” said a third.
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