Why You Keep Buying Things You Already Own

Open the drawer where you keep phone chargers. Count them. Now do the same with tote bags, black t-shirts, kitchen tongs, or whatever your particular version of this is. Almost everyone has a category where they own three of something they needed one of.

This is not carelessness. It happens for a reason, and once you can see the reason, it becomes much easier to stop.

You cannot see what you own

The single biggest cause of duplicate buying is simple. At the moment you are deciding, you cannot see the thing you already have. It is in the shed, at the back of a cupboard, in a box you have not opened since you moved.

Shops are very good at showing you the thing in front of you. Nothing is showing you the one at home. The decision gets made with only half the information, and the half that is missing is the half that would have stopped you.

The thing you own is not the thing you remember

The second cause is subtler. You do remember owning one. You just remember it as worse than it is.

The frying pan at home is scratched. The jacket at home is the wrong shade. The one in the shop is new, and new things are photographed well, lit well, and presented without any of the small disappointments that come with using something for two years.

So the comparison is never fair. You are weighing a real object you have lived with against an idealised version of the same object. The new one wins every time, because the new one has not had a chance to let you down yet.

Buying feels like solving a problem

There is a third thing going on, and it is the one people are least comfortable admitting.

Deciding to buy something feels productive. You have identified a gap and you are closing it. For a few minutes, a problem that was vague becomes a problem that is handled.

The trouble is that the feeling arrives at the point of deciding, not at the point of using. By the time the parcel turns up, the useful part has already happened. That is why the box sometimes sits unopened for a week. The purchase already did its job.

Why lists and rules do not work

The standard advice is to keep an inventory, or to check before you buy. Both are sensible and neither survives contact with real life.

Nobody maintains a list of their own possessions. The effort is constant and the payoff is occasional, which is the worst combination a habit can have. Rules about checking first fail for the same reason: they require you to remember a rule at the exact moment you are least inclined to.

What works better is not a list of what you own. It is a record of what happened last time.

Two moments, not an inventory

You do not need to catalogue your house. You need two moments recorded, and only two.

• When something arrives: roughly what it cost and roughly when you got it. An estimate is fine.
• When something leaves: the date, where it went, and whether you would buy it again.

That second moment is the one almost nobody records, and it is the one carrying all the information. The things you get rid of are the clearest signal you have about what is worth buying, and most people throw that signal out along with the object.

Do this for a few dozen items and a pattern appears without you having to look for it. Certain categories come back again and again. Certain ones never do.

Start with what is already leaving

The easiest place to begin is not your next purchase. It is the pile you have been meaning to deal with.

Next time you clear out a cupboard, before anything goes in the donation bag, note down roughly what each thing cost and roughly how long you had it. It takes about fifteen seconds an item, and you will learn more from one Saturday afternoon than from a year of good intentions.

The things you are about to get rid of already know what you tend to buy. All you have to do is write it down before they go.

Buoycott is being built to capture exactly this, in about fifteen seconds an item. It is an Australian decluttering tool for the home and for personal spending. Join the waitlist to hear when it launches. Join the waitlist →