Experiment run 15 June to 12 July 2026 · Three-month check: 12 October 2026 · Published: 28 October 2026 · Last updated: 28 October 2026 · Reading time: ~9 minutes · The want log, the receipts and the photographs in this post are my own.
I have written four money experiments on this blog and they keep landing in the same place. The subscription audit found that the payments I never saw were decisions I never made. The no-spend month found that writing the wants down turned an impulse into something I could look at. The offer experiment found that a discount is only a saving if the item was on your list. The wardrobe log found that the right question is asked before you buy, not after.
All four are variations on one idea. The purchase is where the decision happens, and the decision is usually made badly because it is made instantly.
So for a month I did the obvious thing. Every non-essential purchase over £10 went on a list with the date, and I was not allowed to buy it until 48 hours had passed. Nothing else changed. I did not set a budget, I did not try to want less, and I did not promise myself I would buy fewer things.
I bought eleven things off the list in four weeks, plus three purchases made under the exceptions I had declared on day one. The interesting part is not that I bought fewer than usual. It is why the rule worked, which turned out to have nothing to do with self-control.
The rule
Anything over £10 that was not food, transport, bills or health went on the list. Forty-eight hours later, if I still wanted it, I could buy it. No further test, no second 48 hours, no guilt. If it survived, it was allowed.
Two exceptions, declared on day one so I could not invent them later. Things that would not exist in 48 hours, such as a sale ending, a second-hand listing, or a ticket. And things I needed to do my job that week. Both were logged separately and are not counted among the 31, and I used the first one twice and the second one once.
The list lived in a notes app with four columns: what it was, what it cost, when I wanted it, and a space for the date I bought it or the date I crossed it off.
The thirty-one
Thirty-one things went on the list in four weeks, with a combined price of £412. Twelve of them did not survive the first 48 hours. Nineteen did, and of those I bought eleven and decided against eight.
| What happened | Items | Value | What it was |
|---|---|---|---|
| Did not survive 48 hours | 12 | £158 | Wanted on a Tuesday, gone by Thursday. Mostly small things. |
| Survived, bought | 11 | £147 | Still wanted on day three, and still wanted enough to pay for it. |
| Survived, not bought | 8 | £107 | Still wanted, and did not buy. The most interesting row. |
| Total | 31 | £412 | £265 not spent, £147 spent |
The average value of a thing I dropped was £13.17. The average value of a thing I bought was £13.36. The two numbers are close enough that price was not what decided it, which I had assumed it would be. I did not drop cheap things and keep expensive ones. I dropped a £40 jacket and kept a £9 candle.
So the 48-hour rule kept £265 in my account across four weeks, which is real money, and it did it in a way I had not predicted at all.
What the rule actually did
I thought it would change my mind. It did not change my mind. Nineteen of the thirty-one survived, which is 61%, and 61% is not a mind being changed. It is a mind being confirmed.
What it changed was when the decision closed. Before the rule, buying something closed the decision immediately: want, buy, done, no more thinking. The rule meant that a want stayed open for two days, and I had to carry it around. And what I discovered is that I would rather not have the thing than carry an open decision for two days.
That is the finding, and it is not flattering. I was not buying things because I wanted them. I was buying them because buying ended the wanting, and ending the wanting was worth £13 to me at the moment I did it. The 48-hour rule did not make me want less. It made the wanting cost something: two days of not knowing. And some of the things were not worth two days of not knowing.
The row I did not expect
The eight things that survived the 48 hours and still did not get bought are the reason this post exists.
These were things I genuinely wanted, two days later, with the price in front of me. And I did not buy them. Not because I had forgotten, and not because the want had faded. I looked at each one and thought: I want this, and I am not going to buy it.
That is a completely different mental event from "I no longer want this." It is the first time in a decade of buying things that I have clearly separated wanting from buying. Usually those two are the same action with no space between them. The 48 hours put a space there, and in eight cases what filled the space was not a change of mind. It was a decision.
The thing I got wrong
I assumed this rule was a version of returning things. Buy it, change your mind, take it back. Same outcome, less effort.
It is not the same outcome, and the difference is the whole point. A return happens after the purchase. You have already paid, you have already had the thing in your house, and you have already had the small hit of having bought it. Returning it is a separate and worse activity that involves a queue.
The 48 hours happens before any of that. There is no purchase, no hit, and no queue. It is a return you do not have to post.
And when I looked at my own history, the returns were the thing I had been ignoring. In the three months before this experiment I returned seven items, about 2.3 a month, each one a thirty-minute round trip plus an email. That is roughly seventy minutes a month spent undoing purchases, and in this month I spent none of it, because there was nothing to undo.
So the rule did not just keep £265 in my account. It also kept roughly seventy minutes a month that I had been spending on the back end of decisions I had made too quickly on the front end. I had never counted that time, because it was spread out and it felt like admin rather than shopping.
Which connects to something from the recipe timing experiment. There, the thing I had been ignoring was sixteen minutes of overhead per recipe, invisible because it was spread across the getting-out and the finding-the-thing. Here, the invisible cost is seventy minutes of returns a month. Both are the same shape: a cost that is real, that I pay regularly, and that I never see because it is not on the receipt.
What I would do differently
I would have kept the rule going. I stopped after four weeks because that was the experiment, and within a fortnight I had bought three things without waiting, all of which I would probably have dropped at 48 hours. The rule is not a one-off test. It is a permanent change to how I buy, and I undid it because the experiment had finished.
And I would have logged the eight more carefully. I know there were eight and I know what four of them were, but I did not write down why I decided against each one, and that is the most interesting data in the month. Was it price, or necessity, or something else? I cannot tell you, and it is the only question I would pay to have answered.
Should you do this?
Yes, and it costs nothing to run. There is no app, no budget, no spreadsheet, and no willpower required. All you need is a list and a rule that says you cannot buy on Thursday what you wanted on Tuesday.
Two things to get right. Declare your exceptions on day one, before you know what they are, otherwise every purchase becomes an exception and you have not done the experiment. And use a list you will actually see, not a mental note. Mine was a notes app, which was fine because I look at my phone constantly, which is a sentence I am aware is ironic given the phone experiment.
What you will probably find is what I found. Most of what you want, you still want in two days. The rule is not a filter for things you do not want. It is a filter for things you want but do not want enough to carry an open decision about them for two days. That is a much narrower filter than "do I want this," and it is far more useful, because you can answer it honestly without a spreadsheet.
Frequently asked questions
Did you buy more at the end of the month to catch up?
No, and I expected to. I had wondered whether the rule would just defer everything and produce a spike in week five. It did not. The eleven I bought were spread across the month, and the wants that survived were bought on day three, not saved up. What did happen is that I stopped the rule after four weeks and immediately went back to buying without waiting, which is a different and worse failure.
What were the two "sale ending" exceptions?
One was a second-hand jacket on a listing that sold the same day. The other was a pair of boots in a sale that ended on the Friday. I do not regret the jacket, which is the one thing I bought this month that I would have been annoyed to miss. The boots were a mistake and I knew it within a week, which is the honest argument against that exception. When you shorten the wait on purpose, you sometimes shorten it for the wrong thing.
Is 48 hours the right number?
I do not know, and I picked it because it was easy to remember rather than because it was correct. Twenty-four hours would probably have caught most of the twelve that I dropped, because most of them were gone by the next morning. A week would probably have caught some of the eight. I would guess 48 hours is close to the right length, but that is a guess and not a result.
Did it change what you want, long term?
Not yet, and I am sceptical that it would. Three months on, four of the eight things I did not buy are still on a list somewhere in my head. That suggests the rule does not train you out of wanting things. It just gives you a place to put the wanting while you get on with your day.
About this post
Written by Maha Alkumaish. I write about the routines and systems that survive a real working week, tested on myself before they get written about. The want log and the photographs in this post are my own.
All photographs in this post are my own. I was not paid or sponsored by any brand mentioned, and there are no affiliate links in this post. More about me and how these experiments are run.
Related reading on this blog:
- I did a no-spend month with three exceptions, where the want list was the mechanism, and this post is the same list with a rule attached to it
- I tracked every "on offer" purchase for six weeks, where the question was "was this on my list before I saw the sticker," and this is the list
- I audited every subscription I pay for, where the payments I never saw were decisions I never made, which is the same problem at a longer interval
- I timed every recipe I cooked for a month, where the invisible cost was sixteen minutes of prep, and here it is seventy minutes of returns
- More Money & Simplicity posts
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