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Thanks to fellow S&S reader, Michael, for providing these warnings about the ways our spending habits are going to be changing as we near the roaring ’20s!

5 Ways You May Spend Too Much Money In The Near Future

There are always some common ways in which people tend to spend too much money, and we hear about them quite a bit. For instance, think of how many times someone’s recited the tip don’t buy $5 lattes to you, or warned you that leaving the lights on can add up. For the most part, tips like these are based on areas in which it’s easy to waste money, and they’re pretty deeply ingrained in us.

However, there are new temptations and trends with each passing year that can similarly lead a lot of us to drain our wallets – sometimes without even realizing it! With that in mind, I did some thinking about what the next few years are going to bring us, and identified a few areas in which people should start realizing they may need to be careful.

1. Subscription Purchases

Right now, subscription purchases are widely viewed as something that saves us money. For instance, with just a few streaming services you can “cut the cord” and stop paying for cable; with a meal kit delivery service, you can save on groceries; and if you love music or reading, a streaming or audiobook service can help you to spend less by month on your hobby.

The concern is that as so many companies across so many different industries realize this, the sheer number of subscription services is going to reach a point at which many of us are paying for things we don’t actually use, or things that are redundant. Be mindful that in a few more years you aren’t paying for so many film and TV services it costs more than cable, or that you aren’t suddenly paying for three separate meal kits just because you wanted to try them all out at one point or another!

2. Excessive Ride Sharing

Here, too, the idea is that ride sharing saves money. Taking a Lyft or Uber to a bar downtown is typically cheaper than riding in a conventional taxi cab, and can be easier also. However, it only takes a few seconds of searching online to uncover an unusual number of money-saving tips relating to these services, which begs the question: Are they actually saving you money?

It seems strange that the internet as a whole would be so active in trying to find saving “hacks” for a service that’s supposed to save by nature. Now, there are certainly some circumstances in which relying on Lyft or Uber results in net transportation savings – but make sure you’re doing your own assessment here. As these services grow and expand (and potentially automate), they may change their prices even as we grow more dependent on them.

3. Online Betting

With legal gambling only just beginning to spread through parts of the U.S., a lot of Americans remain largely unfamiliar with the practice. However, you don’t have to look far to see just how expansive this business can be. Canada’s selection of betting sites (some of which can be accessed from parts of the U.S.) give a nice hint as to the number of platforms and the volume of betting options we may soon have in America. Throw in the fact that most of all of this will be accessible via mobile also – as well as that Americans love their sports and prediction markets – and it’s easy to imagine a ton of gambling activity in the coming years.

Now, some of this is perfectly fine if you enjoy it and approach it with care. But online betting is ultimately another area in which many will need to be careful not to spend too much.


4. Retail

It may not be a revelation to suggest that we’ll need to be careful not to spend too much on retail in the coming years. But rest assured, shopping in general is changing, and it’s going to become both easier and more fun to buy things in the near future.

Apps are constantly improving the digital shopping experience; virtual reality is poised to change how we interact with products both in stores and at home; even augmented reality is altering our outlook for things like in-home furniture and decoration shopping.

Basically, we’re headed into a retail era in which tech is going to let us experience products and then buy them in a matter of a few touches. We’ll all have to try not to overdo it!

5. Augmented Reality Apps

In addition to changing retail shopping, augmented reality is also very likely to produce a whole new digital product market of its own.

Right now, AR apps exist for mobile phones. But with AR glasses just around the corner, and perhaps likely to become the next major personal tech devices (as in, the next in line after laptops, smartphones, tablets, and watches), we can probably expect to see entire suites of new apps.

Hopefully many or most of them will be free, but it’s worth keeping in mind that in a few years’ time you may well have a new “smart” device on which you’ll be tempted to spend hundreds of dollars on exciting and technologically innovative programs and features.