Day 8 Of 30 Days Of Stay-At-Home Personal Finance Wins: Create An Online Shopping Strategy

3 minute read

What if you were able to come out of this time of social distancing and economic crisis with a stronger and healthier financial life? What if you looked at this as an opportunity to take a little bit of your extra time each day to work on your finances?

Since it takes me about 35 minutes to drive to work in the morning and 45 minutes on the way back home, I have an extra 1 hour and 20 minutes of my day that I don’t have to drive while I’m working from home that I can use to accomplish something. This doesn’t even take into consideration all of the networking and social events that would usually take up some of my time throughout the week.

Obviously, your situation is different than mine (and probably a whole lot different if you have kids at home who would otherwise be in daycare), but I’m guessing that we all have at least a little extra time right now that we can dedicate to our personal finances.

It looks like we’re going to continue to practice our social distancing skills at least through April, and now is a great time to work on creating a better financial situation, so I’m giving you 30 days of stay-at-home personal finance wins throughout April.

Unfortunately, I understand that there are many who have (and who will) lose their jobs during this time of uncertainty and objectively will not come out on the other side of this with a stronger financial situation. Hopefully, many of these personal finance wins can help to lessen the blow and make things easier on them. On the other hand, I think that many of these wins are still relevant to those who are fortunate enough to be in a position to not have to worry about their job and their finances to help them build a healthier financial life.

Day 8: Create An Online Shopping Strategy

I bet this isn’t one of the topics you were expecting from me. The truth of the matter is that you’re probably spending more time online and are being tempted to buy things, or are even being bored into online shopping. There are a couple of strategies that you can use to help with this.

Block It

It’s really easy to find yourself wandering to shopping websites during a normal time and I’m guessing it’s becoming even easier for a lot of people right now as they turn to the internet to entertain them more than usual. I think a great first step to take when you find yourself in the position that you’d like to buy something is to ask yourself if you really need it. Most of the time the answer to that is going to be “no”. We hardly ever buy things that we “need” online – those purchases are usually wants.

If this doesn’t work for you and you find that you keep going back to the same websites, then you can just completely block them and take all of the decision-making effort out of the equation completely. Just search for a term like “block a website” and you’ll find plenty of apps and browser plugins that do just that.

Save Money With Browser Plugins

If you are going to shop online, no matter whether you actually need something or you just want to buy something to entertain yourself and/or your family, using browser plugins is a good way to be smart about it and save some money with very little effort from you.

Not only will this strategy help you keep some extra cash in your pocket right now while you might be spending more time than usual on the internet, but it’s obviously something that you can easily continue using for any future purchases as well. All you have to do is add a plugin to your browser and it will tell you when there’s a money saving opportunity to take advantage of whether that’s cash back, points to accumulate, coupons that are available for that product, or a better price on a different website.

I don’t do too much online shopping, but I’ve used Rakuten (formerly Ebates) for years and have gotten a few nice cash back checks that I otherwise wouldn’t have. Since that’s the only one I’ve used I’m not going to give other recommendations. There are a ton of these browser extensions out there and you can find the one(s) that you want to use if you search for a term like “online shopping browser extension”.