 Either welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosalie. I want to do a video today Showcasing a system I've been using for the last couple of months In order to try to get sort of better control over my personal finances And that's basically a system for trying to triage the process of purchasing goods from the internet So depending on where you live in the world You might be a big consumer from websites like Amazon or Ali express or eBay or all three of them and Certainly, I'm quite a big consumer of these marketplaces for tech things The problem is that even though the purchases might not be that big $20 or let's say $50 They do really tend to add up and when I was looking for a system to Try to get more disciplined about the way I spend money on the internet. I Had to sort of Plow through my own brain to figure out well Why did I tend to just buy things when I thought that that would be a good thing to have the reason? What I determined was, you know, I Tend to just do quite good research Find a product do some research about it and I don't want to lose that research. That's really my fear there It's not that I necessarily need let's say a webcam or a camera light or a tripod right now It's that once I go through the process of evaluating specs and what specs I need and reading independent reviews And let's say reddit or something like that. I don't want to have I don't want to lose all that info And then I always feel that if I'm billing clients out, let's say 100 bucks an hour and it's taken me Half an hour to go through this research process. It's like $50 has been invested in the process some cost fallacy clearly But I don't want to lose that time investment I don't want to lose the information and What I thought was a good way to work around my own sort of like mental Blocks in this respect was to just get that info out of my head and onto a page and then I know it's in a Google Document or a Google spreadsheet and I can just go back and find it at a later date And that is basically what my system is here. So I'm just going to go ahead and create a new Google doc from a template and I'll just show it to you here so what I've done is I've just run an Ali express search for a pocket gimbal and This is something that I do actually want at the moment I was going to say need but most things that you want are truly that they're there once so what I've done here is I have Gone into my templates folder in Google Drive and I just created a template. I put this up in the blog I wrote about this For what I called deferred purchases and this has the feels I think are important to get that knowledge out of my head and onto the page and then I review These documents once a month to actually determine. Well, okay. Yeah, this is something that would be really good to buy The beauty of this process is that it puts a bit of distance between your shock on desire to buy that thing from the internet and When you actually make your purchasing and I find that really really helpful I have had the best credit card bills in six months since I started doing this about two months ago So for me, this really works. So just to show you guys what's in my template I have the purchase details, which is where I just describe what I'm looking at I tend to buy obscure tech items. So sometimes I need to give myself a bit of a refresher on what I was even looking to buy Product photos just to bring it to life a bit Another thing I will say is I was trying to work through all my hesitations here and one of them is that you know with online shopping inventory does tend to change and Something you might want to buy now could be out of stock or obsolete in six months So what I like to do is add these product photos So I can just kind of see exactly what I wanted to buy and if there is a replacement product I can kind of keep or resume the shopping process from where you left off the cost obviously is that very very important how much it does this than cost and I also put in here purchasing sources. So This is where like online wish lists are useful But certain marketplaces don't have the best functionality in that respect So Aliexpress only lets you store up to 10 wish lists Now that's not really that bad for a lot of people but I find that a little bit annoying and What I like to do is just this way I can have Multiple links from different stores. So I tend to for bigger purchases often look also at a local supplier to me Compare the cost compare what I'm getting for the money compare the shipping speeds and then make a decision based upon that information so I can just grab all this info from A bunch of different sites and put it into one dock and then I don't need to manage 10 or 20 or 30 different wish lists So if I if I were filling this thing out for one of these gimbals The Jomi pocket gimbal I want to buy This is kind of something that yeah, I could probably justify it before the end of the year at some point I'm gonna go on go for one that has free shipping. So it's an it's an even number to work with So this is the palm to from Femi and just to give an example of what I do is one of these I just put them all this folder. So I'd call it Femi palm to And the idea here is that you're trying to create some distance right between When you want to buy it when the desire to buy something strikes and when you actually go ahead and do your purchasing So you want to give it a descriptive title so that when you're going over this Folder in a month or in three months depending on when you set your calendar alerts You'll be able to say. Oh, yeah, that was the pocket gimbal, right? So Purchase details. I'm just gonna say I would love I would love to have a pocket Gimbal so that I can shoot Stabilized walking footage more convenient conveniently and not have to pack up my full sized Gimbal whatever I want to take some shots and this is where for instance for instance If I had figured out something about the specs that matter to me, I would jot that down here as well So, you know battery life tends to be a lot more limited in these devices so make sure to check that out and Check compact ability with smartphone Some Manufacturer requires specific types to activate So I'm kind of just writing myself a memo as if I'm going into this from scratch in six months time And I've just so I decided I have another five hundred dollars to spend on camera and video gear So I'm not relying on my memory And that's kind of as he said what was the hesitation to me was I just bought stuff because I was like I'm never gonna remember all these Details so I may as well just get all this out of my head now and the easiest way is by just purchasing the straightaway So your brain may work differently, but this is me trying to work around my own sort of idiosyncrasies Product photos I would just grab those as well if you can't just copy it from the website, you know You can just do a screenshot. This is probably violating this Ali express products copyright But again the idea here is just to get a visual representation And that's basically it my purchasing source. I'd probably just drop. Yeah, I jot this down 170 bucks from Ali express and the final thing I have here is purchasing rationale So if you've bought things in a business environment, you probably you're probably familiar with this process of You have to justify buying something by presenting a business case for it, right? So this is in a personal context less formal But I kind of like that way of looking at purchases you need to get some value in exchange for that purchase So this is a place where I can jot down why I think it's worth spending 170 bucks on this thing And you know if my YouTube channel were monetized that might be the reason I'd say well I'm getting great views from these walking videos But it's a real pain to have to bring around this full-size gimbal And I think a smaller gimbal would be really really great Therefore, I think I can justify spending the 180 bucks based on how much I'm earning for YouTube you get the idea final thing I do is So this is where I store these guys if just a folder in my Google Drive I call deferred purchases and The final thing you want to do is set yourself calendar reminders at a recurring frequency Mine are set for once a month on the 30th on the 30th of every month I'm now going into my deferred purchases folder in Google Drive and I'm taking a leaf through what I bought You could see there if I just jump back into it. I have a sub folder called bought So sometimes I cheat a little bit and during the months right now There's something I can say actually that's a really good thing to buy for my computer or for my business So I just move it into a sub folder I also have tried to set up a Google form for replicating this process But I like the manual method a little bit better personally And that's basically it so as then set yourself those calendar reminders every month or you could also do every three months You'd have a double-sided process that what you didn't buy after the month You looked at every quarter or even once a year And then if it gets past that point, maybe you could say well I don't need that stuff if I if a year has elapsed and I've decided that that was not a worthwhile purchase It's probably not something I need So I really like the system it bakes that little bit of sort of cooling down period into your online shopping habits Works for me because I get this stuff out of my head And I know that it's sitting on my Google Drive for what I need it and using the system I've been able to cut down on my online spending significantly not only that I think I've avoided buying a lot of things I really didn't need because it's so much easier to look at that stuff once a month and say Those two things would be great and justifiable for my business the rest I can live without it's just going to be clutter So I think if you're going in a minimalist direction with your life, this also plays into that as well Thank you for watching if you'd like to get more videos from me Please feel free to subscribe to this YouTube channel