I know too many people who excuse extra-budget purchases by saying, “It was on sale.” There are few acceptable excuses for breaking your budget and a sale isn’t one of them, especially if it keeps you from meeting some other obligation.

Sales are marketing tools that businesses use to get people to spend money. Everyone likes to think they have power over the money they spend and what better way to exercise that power than by getting something for cheap. Only, you end up spending more money than you originally planned, so the store is the real winner.

Think about this, if you weren’t planning on buying the sale item anyway, have you really saved any money? I’ll answer that for you. No. It doesn’t matter how much the item was marked down, you actually spent more money than you saved.

Everytime you see a sale, remember this: a sale only saves money when you would have bought the item anyway.