If You Can’t Buy It Twice, Don’t Buy It

This is a very bad article. Frugality is a virtue, and stuff ways you down, so buying less makes sense.

- Once you start buying less, buying nicer makes sense.

- See how an iPad basic gives you 90% of the functionality for 30% of the cost? That's not a rational or helpful way to think about it. What's helpful is knowing how much $$$ the remaining 10% is worth. The decision should be similar if the numbers were all $1000 more. Is the Pro 12.9 worth $700 more? Odds are, if you're a business buying it for a SWE, yes it is. That's 1-2 hours of employee cost. If their productivity goes up by 1/10,000th, it's paid for itself in 1-2 years.

- In a business context, adding $1000 to this price is even fair, once you toss in purchasing, maintenance, etc.

- Space costs money. In places most SWEs live, or for business travellers, space and weight costs A LOT of money. When I was flying every week, I'd spend a lot of an item was a few percent lighter or a little bit more functional.

The way of doing this proposed, though, is horrible. The trick is to do a simple ROI every time.

Nice article, but most of the time people are buying high-end equipment it is either to save time or save upgrade cycles.

In the example about the 4,000 TV, if it has the latest specs and they are not upgrading it for 5-10 years, it might be worth the investment.

Same thing with the top of the line computer, the amount of time saved doing work could be used to justify the cost. Sometimes saving seconds, minutes, hours, days over years is worth it.

I have been at places where it takes 10+ minutes to login and open Outlook to check your emails in the morning. 10+ minutes every morning times hundreds or thousands of workers ad up very quickly.

Any article about personal frugality that mentions buying Apple anything can safely be ignored.

It was probably cheaper to spend $600 to just buy the office treadmill right then, than have 2 employees and the CEO debating the merits of the thing for much more than 5 minutes. Far from being a trap, it seemed like a super cheap way to show that the CEO both cared about the employees and was responsive to exploring opportunities the employees identified.

Feels like a misplaced anecdote. Otherwise it's interesting article about opportunity cost, even if it has a bit of a clickbaity oversimplification feel to it.

I like the headline and live by it. Though I’d argue “twice” is not enough. Personally, I don’t buy anything unless I have enough assets that I could technically buy it ten times.