WSJ Your Money Briefing - How to Break the Buy-and-Replace Trap

Episode Date: May 22, 2025

The constant urge to buy the next new thing can drain your wallet. Wall Street Journal contributor Jeff Galak joins host Imani Moise to explain how to break the cycle and save money along the way.  Sign up for the WSJ's free Markets A.M. newsletter.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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values for illustrative purposes only. Here's your money briefing for Thursday, May 22nd. I'm Imani Moise for The Wall Street Journal. We've all been there. It's easy to convince yourself that that shiny new gadget, living room upgrade, or new car with that fresh leather smell is technically an investment when you first buy them. But odds are you'll be eyeing a new version long before you get your money's worth.

That's the treadmill where we're just constantly chasing our tails looking for the next thing to make us happy. That's fine if you can afford it, but unfortunately the reality of the world is that most of us have budget constraints. This cycle of consumption, buying, replacing, and then buying again, can take a real toll on our wallets. So how do we break free? We'll talk with Wall Street Journal contributor Jeff Gallick about how to trick your brain into being happy with what you already have. That's after the break. What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door.

A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. Buying new things makes us happy. But for how long? Research shows that we tend to get bored with our things before they actually need to be replaced. A recent Wall Street Journal

article outlined ways to beat boredom, boost happiness, and save money along the way. The writer of that article, Jeff Gallick, joins me to explain. Jeff, let me start with a confession. I bought a couch during the pandemic that I loved. It was plush, it was stylish, it made my living room feel like a hotel lobby.

But now I barely notice it. And when I do, it feels kind of blah. What's going on in our brains when that shift happens? So you're not alone in this situation. This is what we typically call hedonic adaptation. Some people call it satiation. Some people call it habituation. Others just call it boredom. What you're seeing is that most products that we want to buy that are enjoyable, they start out that way, but unfortunately our brain tends to reduce that amount of enjoyment as we continue consuming or being exposed to any product that we might have. So an example I always like to give is a simple one. If

you take a bite of pizza, it's delicious, but by the 10th or 20th bite, it's just pizza at that point. It doesn't really have the same value, the same utility. It's the same thing that's going on with your couch. So if this feeling of boredom with our stuff is natural and pretty much universal, why should we resist it? What does it mean for our wallets and what's the cost of constantly chasing that sense of newness?

Yeah, there's a phenomenon called the hedonic treadmill. And it's this idea that every time we buy something, as we just said, it becomes less enjoyable with time. And then what we're forced to do to regain that initial high level of enjoyment is to buy the next new flashy thing. And then that once again succumbs to hedonic adaptation or hedonic decline, and then we again have to buy that new thing. And so that's the treadmill where we're just constantly chasing our tails looking for the

next thing to make us happy. That's fine if you can afford it, but unfortunately, the reality of the world is that most of us have budget constraints, and certainly the more we consume, the more environmental impact that has. So there's a real negative effect on us as individuals from a financial perspective and on our planet from an environmental perspective. So now let's talk about solutions. How can I keep my brain happy without succumbing to the urge to buy a new couch? There's a few things you can do. So the easiest is to think about what is your couch? Is it just the thing that you sit on in your living room or wherever you have it?

Or is it also the accessories that happen to be on that couch like your throw pillows or your blankets or whatever else you might be keeping there? Replacing a couch is expensive and costly. Replacing the covers on your throw pillows could be a few dollars or a couple dozen dollars. And that small change might be just enough to revitalize the enjoyment that you get from that couch. So changing some of the accessories that go with it could be enough to reset that level of enjoyment

in a much more financially environmentally friendly way. In your story, you also talk about how you don't necessarily need to buy something in order to trick your brain into getting more enjoyment out of it. in a financially and environmentally friendly way. when the core features of it are just merely rearranged or reorganized. So a real world example of that might be, if you look at your closet and you're tired of your wardrobe, okay, you could go buy new clothing. That's an option, but of course, as we said, that's expensive. Or you could literally just rearrange

how you organize your closet. Put your shirts where your pants usually are, put your pants where you keep your socks and so on and so forth. And merely that act of moving things around makes the entire set of clothing that you have feel new, even though nothing has actually changed. And that also reminds me of this social media trend that I've seen where people aren't just rearranging things, they're changing how

they engage with those things. For example, wearing your pants as a top or a blouse as a skirt. Can you talk a little bit about how engaging with things in a new way can also give you that sense of novelty? Yeah, absolutely. One of my favorite studies that I've read about, again, not my own here, is about consuming food, so popcorn in this example. Most of us will use our fingers to eat popcorn. But in this study, they asked people to eat popcorn with chopsticks. Most of us don't eat popcorn with chopsticks. And it turns out your enjoyment lingers for more. So if you change the way you're consuming something to something that's unexpected,

that will keep happiness with that popcorn lasting longer. And that's true of anything we do. So I can't speak to the fashion choice of using your pants as a shirt or a top, but I can certainly say that that would be a new way to re-consume the exact same thing you have without being forced to buy something else. That's what we're trying to avoid here. I can certainly say that that would be a new way to buy something else. Okay, so if someone out there is listening and they're thinking that they're really feeling this itch to buy something new, what's one quick thing that they can do to try to revive joy in what they already own?

Instead of saying, I don't have any shirts that I like. with new uses for existing products is surprisingly effective at not just reducing financial burden, but in increasing happiness, which is kind of what I'm mostly after. But modifying things you already have can also be expensive. Going back to the situation we're talking about. So like reupholstering a couch, I agree with you, that could be more costly than buying a new couch. And so you have to weigh that financial decision for yourself.

Is that the appropriate thing for you to do? To buy a pack of dye to change a white shirt to a red shirt is pretty costless. How much does dye cost a couple of dollars? So that might be an easy one to do that'll maintain the happiness, but if the financial burden is high then sure that's probably not a reasonable solution for you. So in the article I also talk about a paint job for your car that could be hundreds or thousands of dollars that's cheaper than tens of thousands of dollars to replace a car, but obviously that's a decision you might want to take a little more time with. So I would scale the time you spend

with the cost of the decision that you're facing. A new shirt doesn't have to be expensive. A new car is almost certainly going to be expensive. I'd take a lot more time on the expensive purchase than I would on the less expensive one. That's WSJ contributor, Jeff Gallic. And that's it for your money briefing. This episode was produced by Ariana Asparu with supervising producer Melanie Roy. I'm Imani Moise for the

Wall Street Journal. Thanks for listening.