Don’t fall for a bargain which you’ll never use

TODAY is Black Friday. What started life as a day of bargains in shops and online has become a two-week spell just before Christmas when retailers try every trick in the trade to get us to buy lots of stuff that we might or might not need.

Some people genuinely use it to buy things that they need, waiting until the last minute with their fingers crossed in the hope that the goods that they want to buy are actually reduced somewhere.

Or at least reduced enough to constitute a “bargain”, however we define that.

Many more of us purchase things that we don’t really need just because we don’t want to feel that we’re missing out on a bargain.

We then leave them lying in a room gathering dust.

And when we rediscover them during a clear-up 12 months later we wonder just why we were so stupid, and when we ever thought that we were going to use whatever it was that we ended up buying.

This year, to be fair, we don’t need to wait until Black Friday arrives to make useless purchases. It seems that we’ve all being buying things that we later regretted since lockdown started.

Sitting bored at home and surfing the internet, plastic in hand, has left many of us with credit card bills that we don’t know how we’re going to clear even before the serious Christmas shopping starts this year.

I read something the other day that suggested some of us would be much better off today if we had invested the money we spent buying things during Black Friday last year.

If you invested in a fund that returned 20 per cent in the last 12 months you would now have £600.

Not a bad return on our money and maybe better than a paddleboard that we’ve never used or a bike that’s still stuck in the garage.

That’s an extreme example I fully understand but it’s just a small warning to watch what you’re spending over the next week or so!

A bargain is only a bargain if you need what you’re buying.