No, I'm an unashamed cheapskate. And I don't have money to burn, that's for sure. But if the product's quality truly justifies its high price, I might buy it if I stand to benefit from doing that. But the top-of-the-range things I've looked at haven't often seemed very good bang for buck.
Have you seen the way the market value of a brand new car falls the moment you start driving it? And what do you get out of it apart from snob appeal? It might be a way for a social climber to get onto a higher rung, but social climbing is against my "religion," apart from lifting oneself out of the gutter.
All my computers except my first two have been second hand. They've served me very well and I've saved a lot of money that way. And I wouldn't know where to start if I got a new PC. It would almost certainly be Windows effing 11 - I'm still figuring out how to kill the telemetry and mindless, dummied-down bloat in Win10, and I still love Win7 32-bit, though websites and browser makers are trying their best to make me give it up, and one day they'll win. I've no problem with buying second hand clothes if the price and quality is right. I like frugality as long as it doesn't descend into squalour.
I do try to stay above the low level where buying on the cheap turns out to be a false economy. I learned my lesson when I got 20 tungsten lightbulbs for almost nothing. They lasted about 2 weeks each, and when they blew, they went bang loud enough to scare everybody stiff. But they were so cheap it wasn't worth demanding my money back, and I still feel I was conned.
I suppose it can get a bit depressing, always searching out low prices and good value. But I don't see much alternative for people who simply can't afford to waste money. I know a lot of people get a big kick out of "having a splash," but I'm not really one of them, even though I appreciate that some expensive things are genuinely very good and obviously it's very nice to use a really high-quality tool or wear a bespoke, made-to-measure shirt. The not-so-wealthy have to make compromises, and I have a certain contempt for those who show off their excess wealth and wasteful behaviour.
Still, I think it was George Orwell who said that no matter how poor a person is, they nearly always manage to acquire something or other that they see as a little luxury every so often. I suppose it's some kind of fatigue from frugality that makes a little bit of extravagance feel like a breath of fresh air and keeps them going.
I can relate to that feeling, but for me I often get my sense of luxury from stuff that I've got for little or nothing. Technology has advanced so much that just using something modern and inexpensive these days makes me feel rich, because I can remember a time when a person could be rolling in money yet be unable to do many of the things that we take for granted these days. An indoor toilet or a plumbed-in bath were once a pipe-dream for most folks. Nowadays you're said to be living in squalour if you don't have those things. I've got them, but having known them go wrong has sometimes refreshed my sense of how lucky we are to have those mundane creature-comforts. I was overjoyed when a plumber fixed the hot tap on my kitchen sink after a few weeks of it being out of action. Everything's relative.
Today, 2:20 pm
Or jewellery for me 
