There is an expression "The cheap comes out expensive". For me it is trying to do my own repairs. Generally this works well for me and I do end up saving money. When it comes to car repairs, on the other hand, paying $400 to have a $150 part replaced is a lesson I will never learn. I buy the right part (or parts) and I plan on installing them myself. The cost start to add up when I realize that I need a special tool or two which I will never use again. It takes me probably 3 times longer to make the repair that it would in the shop, and even if I do get the right part in the right place, sometimes it just doesn't work right.
When it comes to frugality, initially I feel like a champ! I'm ready to go into a store and only purchase what I absolutely need. I find the best deals on gas and other common things that I know I will need. Then reality ends up hitting me in a very abrupt way. I think that I just have some sort of twisted luck that corners me into awkward situations that require I spend more than planned on unexpected events. Or, well maybe, I just need to learn how to save better
I once read a great quote about the cheap being expensive. "He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet."
I bought some cheap curtain rods for my new apartment that broke within a day. I would have been better off spending a little more on better curtain rods. I've also bought cheap dish liquid that didn't make suds and cheap sodas that tasted terrible. In certain cases, you get what you pay for.
I agree, you really do get what you pay for sometimes. If you are buying something disposable, then fine - shop cheap. But for me, when it comes to things like computers, big purchases, or something really practical (like snow boots for example), I'd prefer to spend a little more money to get something of good quality. Otherwise, I'll just end up either paying an arm and a leg in repairs or buying a totally new one.
If I buy impulsively, this could happen, but traditionally I do a lot of research and weigh the possibility of the cheaper object breaking against the more expensive one's initial ticket price. This works well almost all of time, and has led me to purchase Apple products and store brand groceries. Good investments, done through product testing and simple math.
Yes. I've bought very cheap electrical items before, which have broke very rapidly, I ended up buying a mid-range one just a week after I bought the old one on occasions (kettles, microwave). I've also done that with shoes that have degraded very quickly. My £115 shoes have lasted almost 3 years though, so that works out at £37/year, for luxury shoes.
I find that sometimes with dollar store products, you end up losing. I usually buy mostly cleaning supplies, but even then if they are not a brand I am familiar with, they end up not working well and I have to go out and buy the "real thing" plus I have lost on the purchase. One time I took a friends kid who bought some "air soft" guns and they were not a dollar but 15 dollars and up. Spent over 40 dollars, they all broke that day and when I mentioned it to the store owner they said there were no warranties or returns on any of their stuff. That was an expensive lesson. Now I only buy "cheap" items there and expect nothing.
Yes! A recent great example for this is my dog's medicines. I needed to treat him for something, and the vet told me to use a certain medicine. I said it was too expensive and I couldn't pay for it. So she suggested something else, but said it wasn't specific for what he had. It was half the price so I tried it. Needless to say it didn't work as expected and I needed to spend a lot more with another medicine later on. I think we need to try and save money, but there are certain things you shouldn't try to save money. This situation was one of them.... lesson learned!
Frugality will backfire more often than not. YOu need to find a middle ground and spend enough but not too much.
Yeah I bought China made earphones that are supposedly "branded", like it's a quality brand in China, but the way that they made those earphones make them prone to being easily broken. You really can't expect much from an item that is cheap.
I do some online work as well as offline work. I needed a long ethernet cord so that I could move my computer across the room to work at my desk. I bought a $5 long ethernet cord from one of those Chinese sellers on Amazon. It worked for a couple of weeks and then died on me on a day where I had a lot of work to do online. So I might have temporarily saved a few bucks by buying a cheap ethernet cord, but I lost an entire day's work when it died on me. Plus I had a couple of scary hours of troubleshooting because I thought my modem was broken.
Occasionally I buy used books online. There was this one internet marketing book I saw on Amazon and it was sort of expensive. Looking around, I found a site where I could obtain the book at a much cheaper price. Since it was a digital download, I got the book instantly and was shocked when I found out that except for the cover page, the rest of the pages were blank. Since I needed the book I had to head back to Amazon and pay full price for the book. Sometimes I think much as what we do to save money might have negative results, sometimes we have to take such risks so that in future, through trial and error our only regret will be I tried to save but failed because . . . and not I was afraid and therefore didn't try . . .
The biggest one for me comes in when I am waiting for something to go on sale because the regular prices are just much too high for me. There have been times when those items (like toilet paper) don't go on what I consider to be a good enough sale and then I run out and have to spend full price on the toilet paper.
I bought my daughter some cheap $5 earbuds, but they broke easily, so I ended up spending $20 replacing them 3 times until I found her a decent pair that didn't break. It would have been cheaper to just get her a better pair in the first place.
Yeah that's the only thing I can think of at the moment where frugality has backfired. Everytime I would buy earbuds, they last maybe a month. The ones that come with your device are even worse I think. The ones that came with my Iphone seem ok so far but I've only had them a few months. The problem is I never know where to get good earbuds. They are either cheap or don't fit my flicted ears.
My dad is notorious for doing stuff like this, which end up costing hundreds if not thousands of dollars more in repairs to fix them when all is said and done. You seriously need to keep an eye on him at all times, because he will just wander off and start "fixing" something, making an even bigger mess than it was when he started. For example, he had just bought a new SUV and only had it a few months. He went to a carpet store to buy some remnant roles of carpet, and tried shoving them in the SUV and the end of the roll scraped up the front dashboard really bad. So, him trying to "fix" it, goes and gets this cheap can of silver spray paint from the dollar store, and loosely tapes off the dashboard where it got scratched, then proceeds to spray this paint all over it. Not only did it not match the color of the dashboard, the spray got all over the surrounding areas and made an even bigger mess. Whereas he would have simply had to replace a part of the dashboard, now he was going to have to replace the entire dashboard when he traded the car back in. More recently he did something even worse with my older Ford Escape. I'm still pissed over this. It's a 2005 model, and it started to rust a bit over the back drivers side tire. There was a small spot where it rusted all the way through. Without telling anyone, he decided to embark on another one of his "fix it" projects, and started gathering scrap pieces of plastic in the garage, along with what I guess was either spackling compound and/or bathtub caulking and "glued" these pieces of plastic over the rust, then smeared the caulking all over them, and tried to "sand" it all down. It looks like shit, and I'm embarrassed to even bring this into a shop to get it properly repaired. Not to mention, they are going to have a lot more work cut out for them getting all this crap off the car that he glued to it.
It's only happened a few times, but yes, I have ended up having to spend more money in the long run because I made a poor frugal choice. For example, I purchased a used phone at one point. While I have done this before with no problems and I did my research, I still ended up with a phone that started having problems only a few months after I purchased it. I was frugal again by buying a new screen and replacing it myself, but I'm not an expert. The replacement went fine, but a month or two later, I had another issue and I'm betting it was linked to something I accidentally did while repairing it. I could be wrong, but regardless, it meant I ended up paying someone to repair it for me. The phone did last at that point, but my overall cost could've just purchased me a brand new phone back at the beginning.
Target has their own line of kitchen tools and appliances that are significantly less than known brands like kitchenware and T-fal. In their advertisements, these items are targeted to college students but others are attracted to how little these cost. They sell kitchen starter sets for less than $30 and pan sets (about 5, with lids) for around the same price. For most of my life, I'd avoided these until I found I could get a butcher set free through Examiner.com. This sold for about $20 in stores and it's good thing I didn't have kids because knives self-destructed during wash and while in use - the same year I got them.
