The real cost of "good deals"

As someone who just unloaded two moving trucks worth of accumulated living paraphernalia, I would say I’m freshly open to the advice of motivational author Brian Tracy: “Pay twice as much for your clothes, and buy half as many. Expensive clothes are cheaper because you wear them more often.”

Although this proverb seems superficially counterintuitive, the underlying idea is brilliantly vital. Because we must wear something every day, the correct way to approach buying a shirt, for instance, isn’t by thinking primarily about purchase price, but about the number of “wears” you will get out of it. As anyone who has bought both expensive and cheap clothes knows, you wind up wearing the costly ones far more frequently for the simple reason that you like them much better. Although well-made clothes may also last longer, this isn’t the real issue he’s getting at.

In my closet, I have numerous shirts which I paid little for but almost never wear. In addition to taking up space and time, they represent an investment which was easy to make because each outlay was small. But since I rarely wear them and since I’ve over time bought so many of them, they represent an aggregate waste of money, plus the time and effort of storing, ignoring, and moving them.

The real measure of the cost of a shirt is thus the price divided by the number of times you’ll wear it. And since we tend to wear clothes we like many times more often than the others, Brian Tracy’s advice doesn’t even go far enough. In reality, I think that clothes which cost twice as much bring you perhaps twenty or more times as much value because of how much better you feel in them and how much more often you don them.

Now, for someone like me who almost exclusively buys clothes secondhand, all my clothes cost very little. But the principle still applies. I should only buy ones I like well enough to pay more for and know for sure I will wear a lot instead of the ones I like just enough to pay such a low price for.

As a friend of mine used to say, “Some things are so cheap they aren’t worth buying.” I would add that some things cost you the most only after you buy them.

And just to be sure it isn’t missed for not being said overtly, this way of thinking surely applies to any other personal possession as well.