What are some things you can/should cheap out on?

Mr. Forager@lemmy.world to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 275 points –

I often hear, "You should never cheap out on a good office chair, shoes, underpants, backpack etc.." but what are some items that you would feel OK to cheap out on?

This can by anything from items such as: expensive clothing brands to general groceries.

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Free computer operating systems are great these days.

I regularly spend hours designing electronics to be cheaper. Not worse -- just cheaper. Electronic components sometimes vary in price by two orders of magnitude for the same performance, so it's worth cramming datasheets in your head as a professional or hobbyist.

For tools, I've found good midrange Chinese brands, and stuck to them. I could never afford things like Tektronix and so on.

I don't strictly require clothing to be cheap, but I do require it to be fungible -- this works out similarly though. When I find something that's good value for money and looks good, I buy a bunch and rotate them. That way I don't have to think about what to wear, and it always looks decent.

I also prefer cheap laptops. I don't need a supercomputer to work. When I do need a supercomputer, I rent one from google cloud for a few dollars an hour.

I also prefer cheap laptops. I don't need a supercomputer to work.

I've been feeling this one lately. I recently had a very large, super heavy laptop stolen, and I've been wondering why I even had such a mammoth to begin with.

I have a desktop with all the overhead I need for large tasks, any laptop I get basically just needs to run remote desktop with decent latency.

Yup, I do the same -- although my remote desktop is just SSH, so even truly ancient stuff is completely fine. I've been looking at getting a portable terminal as an alternative to even a laptop, which is a bit of a pain to lug around if I'm on vacation.

This technique failed disastrously one time though. A billing dispute between the person renting me office space and the building owner meant my AI workstation got seized for a year once. That was a real pain -- I never expected to see it again. Thankfully it did return to my possession. Eventually.