The difference between a desire and a need
A few years ago, in an effort to budget ourselves, my husband and I created a list of our expenses and a list of things we wanted to have. The list got pretty long and quite creative as we just named every possible thing we had always dreamed of… It was loads of fun.
But then it got pretty overwhelming when we started calculating how much we would have to spend (and how many hours we would have to work) to buy these things.
As I was looking through the list I realized that I could actually split the items into two lists. One for our needs and the other for our wishes or desires. We then made a deal that we would not buy anything on our desires list till 80% of our needs were met.
You know what we realized? That once our needs were met, our desires really weren’t that exciting anymore. Having what we needed made us feel happy and content. Not to mention the fact that our spending cut down drastically.
It’s so strange how before I couldn’t bring myself to buying something I really needed for $50 but we had no trouble spending $50 in a restaurant.
Looks like we need to do this excercise again. 
