The end of the financial year is five days away and that means five more days of the mid-year sales and it could either make or break the family budget.
Tammy from MyBudget joins us now. Tammy what’s the best way to make mid-year sales work for us rather than against us?
Well retailers are really hoping that we’ll see their sales and their specials and then we’ll impulse buy.
But please resist. Even though they’re a great way to save money on things we need – I emphasise on things that we need.
So think about the money that you may spend in the next six months, so birthdays, even Christmas or weddings that you’ve got coming up.
Money that you would ordinarily spend, you could take advantage of these sales, buy those gifts now and save yourself money.
But please try and avoid buying things that you don’t actually need because it’s going to be additional expense and extra clutter that adds up.
Now, what about big ticket items? There are often tremendous sales when it comes to white goods, computers, TV’s, sometimes you get a good sale but it’s attached to an interest free offer.
Could that ever be a good idea? Or is interest free loan always a bad idea?
Well if you’ve got cash in the bank, you could actually take advantage of those interest free deals by asking the retailer for a discount.
Because we all know the retailer is paying the finance company some sort of fee or percentage. So you could use this to your advantage
if you have the money in the bank and say ‘can I get a discount,’ instead of paying the finance company. Percentage so you could use that to your advantage
So sometimes they can be a good idea, it just really depends. But if you are going to take advantage of a buy now, pay later deal, be aware you are entering into a loan contract.
So make sure you can afford it and that you’re going to be able to pay the purchase back within the interest free period.
Because that’s where I see a lot of people getting into trouble. They don’t actually make the repayments to actually pay it off within the interest free period, then they get slapped with a really high interest rate at the end.
And the thing that you mentioned earlier that gets us into trouble, impulse buying, how do we avoid an impulse buy when we see something that is a flashing 60% off? How do you make that mind-shift to perhaps not buy something that you don’t need?
Well that’s the thing, retailers set up their store so when we go in we feel good, we’ve got bright lights, it smells nice, there’s balloons.
It’s all there so they do make that impulse buy. So what I would suggest is walk away from the item. Do you really need another pair of black shoes?
Go and distract yourself and do something different, then go back and see how you feel about the item.
Also check, is it a legitimate discount. Jump on your phone, if you can buy it somewhere else.
You can get caught out thinking you’ve bought something at 60% off and really it was only a small discount anyway.
Tammy Barton from MyBudget, some good advice to not get stung there on the mid-year sales.