Four Common Mistakes People Make While Buying Furniture
Is it time to go furniture shopping? Furniture shopping can be a fun experience, or furniture shopping can be a giant pain in the you-know-what, depending on what you make of it. More importantly, your furniture shopping experience can leave you with furniture you spent too much money on, that doesn’t stand up to the test of time, and that you don’t even like. You’re probably purchasing furniture that you want to use and love for years and years, so it’s important that you don’t have this experience.
To help make sure you don’t end up with furniture that leaves you feeling disappointment every time you see them, we’ve put together a list of common mistakes people make while furnishing a home, to make sure you avoid:
Four Common Mistakes People Make While Buying Furniture
- MISTAKE: Shopping based on sales.
Here’s a secret in the furniture industry: the price tag on the couch is not what you actually have to pay for it. I mean, if you do hand over your credit card, they’ll gladly take your spendable money… but almost all furniture stores allow their sales people to negotiate the price to make the sale. In fact, when a furniture store has a “blowout sale,” they’re actually just inflating the prices so that 50% off seems like a great deal, but they still make a profit. If they were losing money by selling you a couch for less than cost, they’d go out of business.
The point here is, you want to walk away with home furnishing styles that you love and are proud to call your own. When you only shop by price tag, it clouds your judgement. - MISTAKE: Not considering all of the costs when planning your home furnishing budget.
While we’re on the subject of price, make sure that you know what you’ll walk out of the store paying when you make a purchasing decision. They say that when you purchase a car, you can negotiate the price down to pennies, but still end up paying the full cost if you think you won the battle and just accept the financing deal from the dealership. The same is true for furniture financing but we’ll get to that later. However, another surcharge that can quickly make your sweet furniture purchase sour is the cost of delivery. Don’t negotiate a great deal on your new furniture, and then just accept the premium cost of delivery. Make sure to include the cost of delivery in the deal when you are negotiating what you’ll pay for your new furniture. - MISTAKE: Not measuring twice.
So you know the exact placement of your new furniture and you’ve measured it, so you know exactly what sizes you’re looking for. However, when the delivery truck shows up, you realize that your furniture might fit into the area you have planned for it, but it will not fit through the doors, down the halls, and up the stairs to get it there. Surprisingly, furniture delivery people are not magicians. They cannot shrink your furniture to a different size so they can get it through the areas it needs to go through. Make sure you measure both the area you have in mind for your new furniture, as well as the narrowest point it will have to go through to get to that space. - MISTAKE: Getting hooked into a free financing scheme.
Another tactic furniture stores use to get you into their store is to offer seeming incredible financing deals, like zero money down and zero interest for 36 months. When the furniture feels free, it’s easy to make magnanimous purchasing choices. You won’t have to worry about paying for it for another three years, and certainly by then you’ll be a millionaire, right?
However, these financing deals are not only designed to encourage you to buy more furniture, they’re also also another way to squeeze every last drop of money out of you. These promotional financing deals are not actually no interest, they are “deferred interest.” This means that when the promotional period is over, if you haven’t paid every penny, all of the back interest that accrued the entire time hits. Suddenly that “great” furniture deal you got costs $1,000 more in finance charges.