February, 2010:

A lot of people ask me, “Matt, how are you able to come up with such original ideas for your blog?” Well, the truth is that I can’t do it alone, and there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes:

1. At the beginning of every month, ONEin3 Money Commander Sam Hammar sends me an email with the “theme” for the month. It is understood that my next blog post will stick to this theme.
2. Three weeks pass.
3. ONEin3 Chairman Devin Cole calls to berate me for not living up to my blogging obligations. I make a bunch of excuses, then do that trick where you make staticky noises and pretend like your phone is dropping the call.
4. I check what this month’s theme is, then attempt to write a post that vaguely relates to said theme.
5. I review the completed post, and realize that I’ve written some long-winded crap about cheeseburgers that doesn’t really educate anyone about money.
6. I slap on a stupid picture from the internet and collect my hefty paycheck.

It’s a winning formula that has brought literally hundreds of people to this blog, where they’ve left literally a dozen comments. So as February rolled around, I cracked open Commander Hammar’s monthly email and got ready to work my magic.

Hi team! Here’s the theme for February: Engaged? Baby on the way? How to set up your life-changing budgets.

Since the answers to those two questions are “No” and “Jesus, why would you even joke about that?”, it became clear that I was on my own for this month. Which brings me to my topic for today: being a cheap bastard.

Last week I decided to drive out to the Chestnut Hill Mall and check out this kitchen supply store I’d heard about. I did this for two reasons:

1. I’d been meaning to get a knife sharpener and a digital meat thermometer, and the dinner project for the day – pork tenderloin wrapped in bacon – gave me an excuse to get both.
2. I hadn’t driven my car in about two weeks, and I was worried that a homeless person would move in and claim squatter’s rights.

So I get in my car, and of course it turns into an ordeal. First there’s the one driver on Chestnut Hill Ave. who doesn’t realize it’s supposed to be two lanes, then there’s sun in my eyes on Route 9 and I almost miss the mall entrance. And when I finally park and go inside there’s no mall directory in sight, so I spend ten minutes walking back and forth while the guy standing outside the Brookstone keeps suggestively beckoning to me with what I can only assume is a vibrating neck pillow.

Once I find the place, I realize it’s all wrong. No, it’s a great store, but it’s clearly more for the Chestnut Hill crowd than the Allston crowd, more Mario Batali than Rachel Ray. Everywhere I look there are thousand-dollar cookware sets and fancy silicon spatulas, and when I find the thermometers I’m not surprised to see that they’re similarly high-end. The cheapest option is $15, which is about five bucks more than I was hoping to spend.

But I’d gone all that way and went through all the hassle of driving, and I would have felt like an idiot going home empty-handed just to save a few bucks on a thermometer. So I bit the bullet and bought the stuff, and grumbled about it the whole way home. After all, the last thermometer I bought was only ten bucks. Who do they think they are, charging that much?

Then it occurred to me: that ten dollar thermometer lasted about a month before it went nuts and started blinking on and off every time it got near something hot. It was a piece of crap, which was why I was buying a new one just a few months later. Maybe spending a little more on an essential kitchen tool wasn’t such a bad idea?

A couple days later I had a similar experience. I was at the grocery store and I saw that they were selling store brand white bread for $1 a loaf. And they were extra large loaves, so you were getting about 20 slices of bread for a buck. That’s a nickel per slice! If I happened to have a pile of meat and cheese, I could instantly turn it into a sandwich for just ten cents. How could I not buy it?

Of course, it tasted like crap, and now I have a giant loaf of terrible bread that most ducks wouldn’t even eat. What seemed like a great deal turned out to be a waste of a dollar.

The point, my friends, is not that you get what you pay for. It’s that cheaping out isn’t always the most frugal option in the long run. If I’d gotten the $15 thermometer in the first place, maybe I wouldn’t have to be schlepping out to Chestnut Hill a few months later and buying another one. Ditto on the $10 flatware set that turned into rust the first time I put it through the dishwasher. Sometimes trying to save a buck can cost you down the line, and part of making smart purchases is learning when to spend a little more to get a quality product.

So if you’re living on a budget, mind the price tag – just don’t mind it too much.

Picture is from Idiocracy. If you’d like to share your own experiences or tell me how awesome I am, please comment below. If you have a question you’d like answered in this space, please email me at Brownellorama at gmail dot com.