Are you an overbuyer or an underbuyer? | Gretchen Rubin | Big Think

Are you an overbuyer or an underbuyer?

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Overbuyers are people who love to buy — they stockpile things as a result. These are individuals who are prone to run out of space in trying to store their stuff and they may even lose track of what — and how much of what — they have.

One way overbuyers can limit their waste, both money and space wise, is by storing items at the store, and then buy them when they really need them.

Underbuyers tend to go to extraordinary lengths to not buy things. They save money and do fewer errands, however, they often make do with shabby personal items. They may also, when they finally decide to go out to buy a product, go without entirely because the item may no longer be available.

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GRETCHEN RUBIN:

Gretchen Rubin is the author of many books, including the block-buster New York Times bestsellers The Four Tendencies, Better Than Before, and The Happiness Project. She also has a top-ranked, award-winning podcast, Happier with Gretchen Rubin, and a popular blog, gretchenrubin.com. She lives in New York City with her husband and two daughters.

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TRANSCRIPT:

GRETCHEN RUBIN: When you're trying to clear clutter and create outer order, a really helpful question to consider is are you an overbuyer or an underbuyer. And maybe you're neither. Maybe you're just a middle buyer. But many people are overbuyers or, like me, they're underbuyers. So overbuyers are people who just love to buy. They shop. They do errands. They make lists. If they're going to travel, they've got 10 things they need to buy. If their kids are going back to school, they've got 15 supplies that they need. They often will rack up, like, big stockpiles of slow-moving things, like toothpaste or soup. They'll do things like buy something that's going to make a wonderful gift.

They don't know who they're going to give it to exactly, but it seems like a wonderful gift. Or they buy things in multiple colors, or they buy a lot of things on sale. And being an overbuyer means that, often, you have a lot of errands and tasks that you feel like you need to do. You can run out of space because you've got all this stuff that you need to store and manage. You can lose track of how much you have of something because you keep buying a hammer. You don't realize that you have five hammers. And you can spend a lot of money on things that you don't really need yet.

And you can even run into the problem of waste, where something like a scented candle kind of goes bad even before you use it or you're able to give it away, or some kind of medicine expires before you even get to the point of using that bottle of medicine. So if you're an overbuyer, you want to say to yourself, hang on, do I really need to buy this thing? Maybe I can store it at the store. I will leave that extra bottle of toothpaste at the store, and I can get it when I need it, because I'm going to store it at the store, and I'm going to hold myself back. Now, there are also underbuyers. Underbuyers are people like me. We don't like to shop. We don't like to spend. And we will often go to kind of extraordinary and silly lengths to avoid it.

Underbuyers typically don't like to buy specialized products. For instance, for a long time, I didn't have a raincoat. Why do you need a coat specifically for rain? I didn't buy Kleenex. I can just blow my nose in toilet paper. Why do I need a special tissue paper to blow my nose? I don't believe in conditioner. I don't use shaving cream. There's a lot of things where I just don't want to buy something. Now, being an underbuyer is good in some ways, because you save yourself a lot of money and you don't run that many errands. But it can also be really inconvenient because underbuyers often don't have things until the very last minute, and then it can be difficult to get them. Like, if you wait till the very last minute to buy mittens, the store often doesn't have mittens anymore. They've moved on. Often, underbuyers are making do with things that are kind of shabby or aren't really suitable for their purpose. Like, maybe it would be nice to use shaving cream to shave instead of using soap, or whatever my makeshift solution would be. And underbuyers often, too, are very inconvenienced, because they are running out of toothpaste, they are running out of saline solution.

There's things where, you know, it doesn't hurt to have a couple spare rolls of toilet paper somewhere in your house or apartment so...

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