Managing your wants from your needs

Meaning of Need

Needs is said to be a term used by individuals everyday as things that are extremely necessary for humans to go on with their day to day activities in life. They are psychological things needed for survival.

In the old times the only three basic needs of individuals were clothing , shelter and food but as the days were going by the need for knowledge through education, healthcare and safety also became important for the improvement in life. Needs are said to be first priorities as they are things for they keep us safe . And therefore if these needs are not satisfied it may lead to sickness, or death. Needs could also to be said to be necessities needed for survival examples are food, clothing, water, shelter. Among various others

Abraham Maslow grouped the needs of man into 5
Namely

PHysiological need
Safety need
Social need
Self esteem or recognition need
Self actualisation

PHysiological need :- these are list of the basic necessities of life . They could be seen as things needed for human survival and without them no other need can arise

Safety need:- after the basic needs have been fulfilled the needs of being sure his life is.

Social need:- this talks about the human trying to make friends or groups in the society or location be associating self with others

Self esteem :- free socializing they would like to make themselves known by socializing to know what people say of feel about them

Self actialisation:- as the last human need he would like to create future plans on how to carter for himself when he won’t be capable of doing so by gathering resources for his old age use

Meaning of wants

Wants could therefore be seen as things added to the needs, they are things that are wished to be owned to add comfort to ones life and they are said to be insatiable desires. A want is something unnecessary but is said to be items which would help improve the quality of living, examples include cars, stereo sets, televisions designer cloths and many others. Literally wants are desires to make life more enjoyable.

Wants could also be said to be things that are not critical to support the basic needs of surviving because they are associated with pleasant living. And some needs are said to become wants eventually as the days grow by for example the need for special or exotic food cannot be seen as a need anymore but as wants, also the need for luxury cloths is not a need but a want among others are exorbitant lifestyle of assets and expenditures.

Differences between needs and wants

individual wants are unlimited while needs and limited

Needs are must have resources needed for living while wants are substances added for giving comfort in life

Needs is said to represent the necessities while wants is to indicate desires

Needs are very important for human being to survive while wants are different
because without it one can still survive

Needs are things required for life and might not be constantly changed while wants are items desired either to fulfil immediate wants or future and they can change

If needs are not attended to in due time it might lead to sickness or even death while wants that are not mainly needed for essential living not being able to fulfill the wants would just lead to mere disappointment

Needs are essential for the day to day survival while wants are inessential for the day to day survival

Needs are things that must be gotten while wants are things wished to be gotten

Often when money is being earned individual at large face the issue of not knowing how to differentiate between the needs from wants in term of spending which makes him get things that won’t last long for survival usage.

Below are ways to help in managing the personal wants from needs:

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To identify ones trigger: in knowing what makes one spend on wants he should be able to identify items that if he sees he won’t be able to get his mind off them or making sure he knows things that would trigger him from spending on inessential items so as to create solution for times when he sees such things in the market because if he doesn’t identify the things making him to spend he won’t be able to solve his problems of wasteful spending

Stopping yourself in the act: it’s very hard from stopping oneself to get things they want even when they feel they need it to quench their thirst, but it is something that must be done to have a leverage label on finance. But to make stoping spending on wants easily it is reasonable to have a budget at mind that should be worked up to do as to reduce expenses and might help in increasing savings

Keeping a journal or scale of preference: the scale of preference is said to be a list of wants or needs arranged in order of importance or priority. Or explained as the most pressing needs to be ranked as the highest while the least pressing need to be arranged lower. The tool is use for arranging and ranking wants in order of importance so that resources can be channeled to the most pressing needs.

So when keeping journals it helps to differentiate and know things needed to be bought from things wanted and it is said. That things written are easily remembered and good corrections are tended to be made in term of making decisions

Making rigid choices: this concept simply means the decision by economic agents (individual, firms or government) to select the most pressing needs out of a range of alternatives. I’m managing wants from the needs the individual must be able to made choices on what is to be gotten or spend money on and be able to stand on it by not changing his mind when he sees another alternative of want.

In conclusion, it would be reasonable if the individual makes budget decisions and identifying his wants from needs respectively and being able to differentiate between them to help reduce the habit of irresponsible spending on wants

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