Other People’s Splurges Making You Jealous? Here’s What To Do

You watch your neighbor coming up the driveway on his new sports car. You get jealous.

You hear your co-worker announce his decision to take a foreign trip vacation, and you get jealous and envious again. 

Your best friend gets a bigger house. And guess what? You feel the same!

All that you can think is how are they able to get and spend all that money.

You smirk and explain to yourself that maybe they are deep in debt anyway, or maybe they have trust funds taking care of their luxuries, or that at this rate they’ll never be able to retire anyway. Or maybe, you think grimly, they have found out a money-making secret you have not.

Let’s look at it this way. Foreign trips, a fancy car and others are just outward manifestations of one’s long-term financial decisions. Besides, these things are just on the surface. There are many things under the surface which you cannot see. The ones who get or buy these things, there are consequences and trade-offs for these.

You see what they want you to see

Let’s elaborate on that last point a bit. This is something worth remembering when we see the grass is greener on the other side. Psychologists and economists say that we care for our status more when compared to our peers. When we do that, we tend to buy or consume more than we plan to. That is hard to keep track of, and ultimately damage our finances. And yet, these decisions are not based on logic, but on emotions. We fear losing our self-esteem if you lose out to the competition, which we deem the phenomenon as. If our spending is more than the average of our social group, we see ourselves as better than the rest.

These activities lead to the social phenomenon called Conspicuous Consumption. It’s how the rich buy luxury goods to display their wealth and status. 

However, this is not limited to the rich people only. It is also not limited to real live either. We can see signs of it in our virtual Facebook life as well. We see all the good and happy pictures, videos and what not of our contacts there. All that sends a signal to our brain that they are doing much better than us, or are wealthier than us not. This permeates our lives. 

Comparing with others leads us to make hasty buying decisions. Other’s economic successes spur us into action. We become competitive. That can be good as it leads us to work harder, preserve more, and invest more. But it can also lead to wasteful buying of things which are of no use or are not important at all, just because we do not want to miss out on things which our peers have.

You can see what they sacrifice

When someone says that they have bought a sports car, for instance, we are too amazed to figure out how much they sacrificed to get that. Most people are not setting on a pile of gold, and therefore they have to save up a lot for all the good things they need to buy.

Experts advise that you need to track your spending. That is the first step.

Secondly, set financial goals. When you do this, it changes your behavior from jumping on the bandwagon to saving up for yourself. If you still want all those luxuries, at least not you can make planned financial decisions. You can save up for years and then get all the things you love, instead of destroying your personal finance.

Ultimately, it is up to you to decide whether you want to buy something or not.