The study was designed with a two-stage research approach. The first stage included a large sample, mail survey with about 1 200 households participating. The second stage consisted of personal interviews with a sub-sample of respondents from the mail survey. About 130 households were interviewed in this second survey. The purpose with the study is to describe the various planning activities that a household goes through when buying goods and services from a market system; to analyse the relationship between the situation and the characteristics of the household and the planning behaviour; to evaluate the efficiency of planning, i.e. to study the effect of different planning on the buyer behavior and the satisfaction in the household.