Want 15 percent more money in your pocket at the end of the month? It can happen by simply applying waste thinking to what you have spent or are about to spend. By just changing the way you think about what you do with what you are about to purchase or what you already own has a very high potential for reducing your overall living cost.
People, especially Americans, waste an incredible amount of what is purchased. Waste is fundamentally bad! It is bad for our pocketbooks and bad for our environment. Elimination of waste flows directly to the bottom line for both individuals and companies. Typically, it is one of the more fruitful areas on which to focus, but it has to be correctly understood in its entirety first.
Waste goes far beyond all that extra uneaten food that goes down the garbage disposal or into the trash, did you know that 1.4 pounds of food per day per person goes to waste in America. You must think of waste as anything that you have purchased which gets treated in any of the following four ways:
1. It does not get fully consumed.
Food is the classic example that can be mentally expanded to other items. It
occurs when more is purchased at a restaurant than is eaten, or when more is
cooked than can be eaten and is eventually tossed. But this also applies to
excessive amounts of clothes, shoes, and many more material things, even if
they are given to you. Use what you buy or better yet don’t buy things that won’t get much use.
Do you have an extra car, a boat, snowmobile, etc that you rarely use? These then are major expenditures not being used or in other words your investment in them is going to waste. A garage filled with unused kids’ toys is yet another example.
2. It is consumed at a greater rate than required or is normal. I will, again, use food to introduce this form of waste. It’s the tendency to eat more than we need to survive,
which adds as much to our weight as our bodies will allow at the moment, and then our body dispels the rest.
Another example of this - if the tires on your car are expected to last for 50,000 miles, and you 
have to replace them at 30,000 because they are worn out (a favorite topic I had to have with my son several times as a teenager). Something is causing this greater-than-expected rate of wear, thus wasting the tires and creating an expenditure for new ones.
3. It is abused, neglected, or damaged. Unnecessary repairs are a costly form of 
waste (one more of my favorite father-son topics). Similarly, if something cannot be used because it has been rendered inoperative, the investment (expenditure) is going to waste. It pays to take care of things.
4. It has unusable features or attributes. This can be a little trickier to understand, because in many cases the things we buy, especially technology products, have more functionality than we can learn in a lifetime. However, there are many examples which clearly demonstrate this form of waste.
This type of waste relates to value-based spending decisions. Value-based spending is when a product or service is correctly purchased because it is capable of meeting the intended purpose, without additional unusable features. As such, it is likely to be the lowest purchase cost alternative.
Value spending fulfills the need with minimal or no waste. Purchasing well-marketed and popular name brands rather than what is really needed is actually a form of waste because there is no additional value.
You surely can grasp the meaning of waste and its four variations. Always attempt to minimize waste. If you were to apply waste thinking when making a purchase or making use of that purchase, you would find that you would have a lot more money at the end of the month, easily 15% more.
What ideas do you have about reducing waste therefore getting more out of your money?
