Tag: Personal Finance

I’d like to reframe this question, see I think one of the reasons that Experiences beat possessions is that most possessions are acquired as means to experience “buying/shopping” and because shopping is a low quality experience I believe that people who go for experiences are happier. I think a nice avenue to study this is to compare model builders versus shopper of less active/creative/input driven stuff and I think that the results would validate my reframing.
I am taking a vacation a few months from now and the truth is the only way I am affording this vacation is through belt tightening and delaying some of the things I would have already bought weeks ago, if not for this short vacation. When coming up with the decision to live frugally for approximately  4-5 months (I’ve got alot of credit card bills mostly grocery and books/comic books/cds and a few restaurant bills, If I knew earlier I probably wouldn’t have to be as frugal now.) The thing I was thinking about the most is that I have strong emotional memory (I don’t know If there is such a thing but that is the closest short set of words I can come up with).
My EM goes both ways I remember the ups and downs and the uniques. The way I see it is that If a choice has to be made then the choice would be experience over material things.

Why do experiences fare better than possessions?
It seems, then, that at some level we understand that our experiential purchases give us more pleasure than our material purchases. But why is that? Van Boven (2005) suggests three reasons:
1. Experiences improve with time (possessions don’t).
2. Experiences are resistant to unfavourable comparisons
3. Experiences have more social value
Experiences Beat Possessions: Why Materialism Causes Unhappiness « PsyBlog.