How ‘friction maxxing’ can help you stop impulse buying

Close-up of a woman's hands holding her phone and scrolling in the dark — Slow down and be more intentional about your finances

(Image credit: Urupong / Getty Images)

When you are already scrolling on your phone, your credit card information is saved and shipping is free, it can be a little too easy to click ‘buy.’ Even if that purchase is small, these shopping slip-ups can quickly add up. Over time, they may push your well-laid financial plans off track.

Such incongruence between actions and intentions can also bring about feelings of guilt. According to a study by Liquid Web, “14% of shoppers have bought something within one minute of seeing an ad, and 85% regret an impulsive online purchase,” said Investopedia.

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What is friction maxxing?

In essence, friction maxxing refers to the practice of adding friction, or some degree of difficulty or inconvenience, to a task. The practice can apply in practically any area — it may look like “cooking from scratch instead of ordering a delivery, finding your way using road signs instead of just plugging in the [GPS] or reading a book rather than half-listening to the audio version of it,” said The Guardian.

The point is not to make your life harder, but rather to cause you to slow down and be more intentional about your time and choices. When it comes to finances, that might mean deleting your saved payment information from your favorite shopping sites, so you are forced to pause for a moment, get up and get your physical credit card; during this time, you could reevaluate whether the purchase really aligns with your broader financial goals.

How can adding friction help you spend less?

When spending “feels easy, it grows quickly,” so the idea is that by “adding small inconveniences, known as ‘friction,’” it “gives your brain a moment to assess whether a purchase is worth it,” said Empeople Credit Union. During this pause, you gain a little bit of space to more deliberately weigh your decision to purchase, and you may ultimately decide against it.

Course-correcting these seemingly small decisions can add up. While “each decision may add only a few dollars to a receipt,” when it reoccurs “over weeks and months, these minor deviations can total hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year,” said Yahoo Finance.

You can also introduce friction around your exposure to spending opportunities. After all, if you do not even know an item exists, you cannot feel tempted to buy it. After committing to “block social media and shopping apps from 5 to 9 p.m. on weekdays,” one finance writer reported cutting their spending “by $300 compared with the previous month,” which they then put into their family’s “sinking funds, rather than let it slip away toward impulse purchases,” said NerdWallet.

What are some easy ways to add friction to your financial life?

If you are intrigued by the idea of financial friction maxxing, there are some easy ways to institute it:

Delete saved payment information
Turn off one-click purchasing
Get rid of shopping apps
Cut back on time spent scrolling and on social media
Institute a waiting period, such as 24 hours or even a week, before making a purchase

Becca Stanek has worked as an editor and writer in the personal finance space since 2017. She previously served as a deputy editor and later a managing editor overseeing investing and savings content at LendingTree and as an editor at the financial startup SmartAsset, where she focused on retirement- and financial-adviser-related content. Before that, Becca was a staff writer at The Week, primarily contributing to Speed Reads.