3 Purchases I’m Totally Ready to Stop Being Cheap About

In these cases, I’ve confirmed it’s true that you get what you pay for

A couple of years ago I came across the adage buy once, cry once. Not only is it funny, but I’ve also found it to be true.

It’s wince-inducing to fork over a ton of money when you’re buying something, but it’s almost always true that the price tag means better quality and better customer service throughout the life of the product. (A lot of the time it also means the product will stay good longer than you’ll be alive.)

The only problem is that if you’re not part of that tiny percentage of people who can buy whatever they want, whenever they want, your budget limitations mean you have to compromise.

I’ve been a freelance illustrator for well over a decade with a paid writing stint here and there. I love what I do. But I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, these are not fields to get into for a sure path to financial security.

Most of the time, I’m waiting for payment on invoices that I sent a month ago, for projects I finished several weeks before that, which I received the creative brief for several months before that.

I’ve learned to pinch pennies until Abe gasps for breath. A lot of the time it means buying on the cheap until I can afford to upgrade. (Which sometimes means buying another cheap replacement when the first cheap thing breaks or wears out.)

Most of the time it’s fine. There are a handful of items, though, where the difference between cheap and expensive is so pronounced that I’m ready to accept that the sticker shock is worth it.

1. Electronics

My wife and I decided to buy tablets for our girls. Now, we’ve both been diehard Mac users for nearly 20 years, but the dang things are expensive as all get out.

We thought we’d save a few hundred bucks by buying a couple of much cheaper Kindle Fire tablets. I’d been using a Kindle Paperwhite e-reader for several years and love it.

Turns out, you get what you pay for. We instantly plunged into the world of technical problems with freezing, memory shortage, app compatibility, confusing UX.

We bought micro SD cards to solve the storage problems. The cheaper off-brand ones we bought first didn’t work, then the replacement brand name cards didn’t solve the memory problem.

We sent them back, got iPads on credit, and the headaches went away just as instantly as they arrived. We realized this is why we pay so much so for Apple products.

2. Coffee

I’ve been a drinker of black coffee since my teens and worked at several coffee shops and a roaster in my twenties.

I know good coffee. I love good coffee. I don’t often feel like I can justify buying good coffee.

So I compromise at my local Walmart. I always get whole bean. I squeeze the bag and smell the aroma that the CO2 valve releases. (You’d be surprised by how easy it is to detect staleness.) I try to stick with the brands whose inventory I know moves quickly.

But darn it, expensive coffee is expensive for a reason. Coffee production is an extremely finicky process. When it gets expedited for greater volumes at lower prices, the quality suffers. When you’ve had a pitch-perfect $20 bag of single-origin from Culture Culture, you can actually taste that East African coffees tend to have fruity notes.

I’m still not quite at the budget point where I feel like I can go above $10/bag, and I’m making do with the OK stuff. But man, I’m ready to level up.

3. Underwear

I’d say this would be TMI if it weren’t so relevant.

I cheap out on clothes big time. Most of the time that means going for longevity, like wearing shirts until they’re holier than the Pope. It also means on the rare occasion that I do buy clothes, it’s about hitting the sales, discount stores, and generally sticking to the budget options.

Except for the good ol’ undergarments. It’s a world of difference when you buy a nicer pair than going for the scratchy, ill-fitting one. And that’s new — the cheap ones get even more scratchy and saggy over time, whereas the nicer ones tend to only fray at the seams.

And I’m still just talking about the more expensive ones at Walmart. I can’t even imagine the comfort and durability of the high-end underwear I see on social media ads.

What products have you most noticed in the quality-price continuum? What are you noticing yourself unwilling to be cheap about?