How many online reviews do you have to read before you buy a pack of batteries? How many experts do you have to consult before eating a hamburger? Unless you’re Frank Sinatra, you don’t have to get the absolute best of everything.


As personal finance site Frugalwoods explains, trying to figure out the exact perfect, best decision in all situations is exhausting. Having too many choices and too many factors to weight leads to analysis paralysis. You have a hard time making any choice because you don’t know that it will be the best one. Here’s the kicker, though: most of the time you don’t need to make the “best” choice anyway.

The easy access to massive data sets and consumer reviews in cyber space tempt us down the path of needing to know the “best of x” in every possible scenario. Before the internet, it wasn’t possible/practical to: 1) discuss minutiae at length with others who cared/would put up with you, or 2) purchase the vast array of stuff ye olde internet proffers. In the olden days, if you wanted to know if a product was good or not, you had to go to the library and look up old issues of Consumer Reports. Or ask your friends. Or just flat out not care. While this approach surely wasn’t the most efficient, spending an entire weekend researching lumen levels is equally inefficient.


Most of the things that you buy that are “good enough” will be fine. If you want to spend a few days weighing which car to buy, that’s fair. However, you don’t need to spend nearly as much time figuring out which silverware set to get. They’ll all do the job pretty well. Instead of trying to pick the best of everything, accept that some sub-optimal decisions are still okay and move on with your life.

The Sneaky Way That Frugality Fixes Paralysis By Analysis | Frugalwoods via Rockstar Finance

