I was in Kohl’s the other day, and I freakin’ love Kohl’s. It’s the perfect store for someoe who’s about to discover maturity, but doesn’t have enough money to fully embrace it. My wife and I bought a bunch of cool stuff for our apartment, and she bought some new shoes. We came for the shoes, but we walked out with an extra $60 worth of loot.

First of all, I’m a sucker. You know how retail stores put up signs saying everything is 50% off, but they really just jack up the MSRP, and the 50% price ends up being the normal price, anyway? I fall for that scheme all the time. I always feel like I’m “getting such a good deal”. I didn’t walk out of Kohl’s feeling guilty, because we could have done much worse damage. However, I did feel a little shameful buying some stuff that we didn’t intend on coming in to buy. Here are a few things that I’ve learned from being a sucker to spending in retail stores.

• Walk in with a plan. We had a plan to buy my wife some new running shoes, but we started out browsing in the home goods section. This is not good. We found a bunch of stuff at reasonable prices that we liked, and there you have it — impulse buys. I understand that browsing is part of shopping. You may not know what you are looking for until you see it. But this leads me into my next point.
• It is possible to budget for impulse shopping. Factor in your budget some money to do whatever the heck you want with it. This is why I walked out of Kohl’s feeling a little guilty. We didn’t really budget the money that we spent. We just used money that made from a side business. If you’re like me, then I don’t think you should kid yourself. You’re going to walk into Target or Best Buy and end up buying a CD, DVD, or something else that tempts you every time you walk by it. Be real with yourself and budget out impulse buys.
• Try not to be an idiot and fall for marketing schemes like me. Buy one, get one free. 50% off the entire store. 0% interest for 40 years, or whatever it is. These are all ways to get you to SPEND more than you normally would spend. I fall for them, and I’m sure some of you do, too. Buy one, get one free is like music to my ears. Publix, a popular grocery store in the Southest, does this all the time. I don’t really need two cartons of sour cream, or two salad dressings, but it makes you want to buy that particular brand. But in reality, they just increase the price of the product, and then you almost end up paying just as much as if you would have bought both of them on a regular day. They also do this to push certain brand names on you. I hate it when retailers get pushy.
• Don’t try to keep up with technology. I’ve expressed my frustration towards Apple in the past. They want you to buy every new iPod that they come out with. And conveniently enough, they come out with one about once a year! Now, DVD’s aren’t good enough. We need BluRay and HD DVD. But soon enough, it’ll be affordable enough to have a hard drive underneath or possibly even built in to our TV’s to store all the movies we want. Technology wants to lure us into trying to keep up with their latest and greatest models. They love to prey on people like me. I always pick up the Sunday newspaper just to look at the weekly fliers for Best Buy, Circuit City, and various other electronics stores. Ugh, technology sucks.

I don’t think we should feel guilty when we spend money. Money was meant to be spent, saved, and given to other people. You can’t save all of your money, you can’t give all of your money away, but you CAN spend all of your money. This is why we have to monitor our spending more than anything else. It will make us or break us, but it should still be FUN to spend money. I may be in the minority, but it’s always more fun spending money when I have control of it. Going out one night and blowing $200 bucks on alcohol and food may sound like a crazy, fun night, but then you wake up in the morning and throw up thinking about it. Or, you just throw up from drinking too much.