Black Friday

It seems like it's a tradition to do Christmas shopping after your Thanksgiving dinner. With stores opening earlier and earlier every year, people might really need to skip the turkey if they want a deal. According to the NRF, $59.1 billion was spent during the Thanksgiving weekend in 2012. That is a pretty big number for a single weekend. But is that mad dash to the store really worth it?

I personally haven't done any black Friday shopping for a while now. One of the reasons being that we do not really buy things we do not need, even if it is dirt cheap. We buy most of our items at a discount already. We barely pay for anything at list price. With almost every store having some sort of black Friday deal, people put things into their carts without even thinking it through. I was once at Walmart during the mad hours and saw a lady with 5 slow-cookers in her cart. Ok, fine...you are giving them as Christmas gifts or you really need another 3 just in case your other ones break. Even though it was advertised at a price slightly lower than usual, I have seen it at an even deeper discount for the same model at Costco more than once during the year. Again, do you really need everything you put in your cart?

The answer to that question is probably no. But most people will say, hey, it is so cheap, why not? True, it is cheap, but that $10 you do not spend can be put into your bank account. If you invest it, with an annual 10% return, it will become $25 in ten years. It will become two and half times more than what you had today. Plus, that slow-cooker might end up in your basement for the next ten years collecting dust without earning you any extra income.

So are you going out after your turkey dinner to join the millions of others for black Friday or are you going to save that money in the bank?



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