Have a budget plan always ahead

The pandemic reminds us of the importance of having a budget plan. When you know where your money is going, it will make it easier to isolate needs and wants, then shift more toward what is most needed, which are our necessities. The impact of a pandemic on people is different from the various happenings in our lives. The key lesson here is that any circumstance can change our lives in an instant. It’s important to build our emergency savings fund and create a financial plan. At the end of the day, with the right plan and enough budget, we will survive any incident in our lives.

COVID-19 has turned our lives upside down. It also affects our health and wellbeing. A global crisis struck the world in the shape of the COVID-19 pandemic at the beginning of 2020. As a result, supermarkets experienced panic buying behaviors, empty store shelves, out-of-stocks, and a large increase in online sales. Supermarkets, producers, marketers, and businesses have had to adapt to consumers' changing buying behaviors in food consumption. Across the world, when lockdowns started to be imposed, anxious consumers pinched pennies as they tried to cope with the new restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. At first, consumers focused primarily on purchasing items necessary to survive and protect themselves against this new and unseen threat. But what exactly did consumers purchase throughout the year due to the pandemic?

Beyond the impact of COVID-19, some of the factors that determine consumer spending, consumer confidence, unemployment levels, or the cost of living. The COVID-19 pandemic has also drastically altered how and where consumers choose to spend their hard-earned cash.

From that point forward, general health concerns and several measures, such as stay-at-home orders, gathering restrictions, and store closings, led to a significant shift in the daily lives of people. Travel was banned, telework increased, and consumer spending behavior changed in significant ways. We understand behaviors such as a person's observable actions to carry out an intention, assuming the action is performed in an environment where prior conditions are constant and the individual is considered rational. Despite the contextual changes and emotional impact arising in the context of a crisis, consumers tend to concentrate their purchases on basic goods rather than luxurious ones. Therefore, consumers tend to adjust their considerations of luxury products by switching to more economical products and favoring products oriented towards covering their basic needs. When a crisis occurs, consumers do not want to spend money on high-quality or high-value products, even when they could afford such items.

Today, consumers have developed new habits that result in new preferences for brands or products. Demand for simplicity, discretionary thrift, mercurial consumption, green consumerism, and ethical consumerism. Thus, consumers were affected not only economically but also psychologically, and this impact was quite notable in terms of both short-term and long-term consumption behaviors.