Stop Researching And Just Go Buy It

Stop spending irreplaceable hours researching cheap items on websites and just spend easily replaceable dollars purchasing different brands and models until you locate one you are satisfied with.

What is the point of spending hundreds of hours a year of your valuable time researching on various websites which $50 products to buy? Just go ahead and buy the damn thing, keep it if you like it and sell it if you do not. A lot of us will easily kill a good ten hours researching headphones just to buy a pair for twenty bucks. What is the point?

We do not even know if we will like the headphones until we try them on. Why not just keep buying headphones that appear halfway decent and try them out? When you find a pair you like, sell the rest on eBay or Craigslist or give them away to your friends and family as gifts.

Spending 20 hours researching digital cameras to buy one for $100? Buy five sub-$100 cameras, try each of them out, sell the ones you dislike.

Selling your unwanted items on eBay means you are hardly likely to lose money. When listing the items claim they were a gift that you never used and you might just learn enough about using eBay for something other than buying stuff. I spend a lot of time researching big-ticket items or anything over a few hundred dollars such as a new laptop or video projector. Anything below $100 I do not even research anymore.

But we are not all rich, you cry! I guarantee I do not pay myself anywhere near what you earn in your professional art, IT or software development job, and I can still afford to buy multiple brands of an item to try out rather than empty hours researching each one.

If you buy $500 worth of various headphones and sell the ones you do not like, you might lose $50 but you will gain a huge insight in to the different brands and models and you will eventually find the exact pair you are looking for. How long would it have taken you to research online to find the ideal pair? You will remain unsure whether you want a particular set until you actually get them and try them out.

I have purchased five separate Bluetooth headsets over the course of six months to figure out which one I wanted. I currently have two different headsets now, one for the car, and one for exercising, I could only have found out which ones work best in a particular situation by trying out different models rather than relying on anecdotal evidence and poorly written reviews that gloss over the important details.

The point is, I figured out which ones I wanted by trying them out, then returned the headsets I disliked to the store. Once I found one I liked, I kept it.

Often I would find that immediately after opening the box and trying out the headset for even a few minutes I was already convinced I did not like the device. There is no way I could get that kind of feedback and experience from a review, no matter how detailed. On more than one occasion, it took me longer to run the errand to Fry’s than I kept the item. Best Buy and Fry’s Electronics both have great returns policies and they are worth taking advantage of. I can buy cheap online and concern myself with obscure policies and the hassle of packaging up an item for return or I can pay a little more at retail knowing I can head back to the store at any time and exchange the item for something else or a full refund.

When you are thinking of returning items to the store, selling them on eBay or gifting them to a friend or family member, just be careful as you open packaging and it can all be re-used or returned. If you are donating an unwanted item to someone, packaging is not so important, wrap it up nice and give it to them, they will not worry too much that the box is a little mangled or that the wires are not quite pristinely tied off as they once were.

Unless your purchase is for several hundred dollars or thousands of dollars it is just not worth researching for more than an hour to find out your options.