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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   4727 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 27, 2023

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What's your philosophy on spending on hobby equipment? Let that be better kitchen equipment, better sports gear, better gaming gear, whatever.

I strongly lean towards the "A bad carpenter blames his tools" and "The magic is in the artist's hand not the paintbrush" camp and think that when partaking in a hobby the "right" way to do things is to practice frugality in the initial stages and upgrade the equipment as you grow out not in.

Some examples of this in practice;

  1. I used a rackety old bicycle I bought used for years until I built up enough fitness where the cycle was the limiting factor and not my legs. Then I bought a name-branded bike and was instantly much faster. (For aspiring cyclists, yes it actually takes years.)
  2. Used shitty grocery store knives until I developed enough knife skills to justify owning a Victorinox Fibrox. Still nowhere near justifying one of those Japanese blades.
  3. Bought a good gaming setup with a good GPU, Mouse, and 120Hz monitor after years of gaming on a shitty setup.

However, I'm seeing the holes in this line of thought as I am in a place now where I can just afford the "good" equipment to start off with. There exists no Frugality or Thriftiness God who will look down on me for breaking the old ways, if anything, I might be somewhat of an extremist in that regard.

But it feels "wrong". One of the things that helps me sleep easier at night is that I live this way. But why? Any arbitrary things helping you sleep well at night? Or is it just a made up struggle?

If you care about the objects around you, having nice objects is stressful because you have to give a shit.

I have a very nice very expensive santoku I bought from a dude in japan; and I made a little wooden magnetic knife rack just for it and it has a special set of king stones for sharpening it and it gets dried and put away after every use; where as I overarm throw my Victorinox into the sink after I'm done slamming it into bones and shit (this is an exaggeration, but still).

I beat the shit out of my Victorinox as well. I mean that's the whole point right? 10-15 minutes on the wetstone and its back to brand new.

I always tell people who want to get into cooking (as the food guy in the social networok): get a Kirkland french oven (if you can find it), a tramotina non stick skillet, a madin carbon steel 10", and a Victorinox chefs knife and you are fucking set for life.

You can pay more money for all those things, but you are seeing fractional improvements for geometric price increases; and if you pay less you are actually seeing a serious difference in performance.

(The madein pan is a bit of luxury; you can get a cheap cast iron and get the same or better performance but cast iron is a big hassle.)

This is why I love to buy things like furniture and fine clothing used. If it's already gotten it's first scratch(es), I don't have to baby it.

Not always hobby related but I have found the old saw about buy the nice one for anything that contacts both you and the ground to have made meaningful increases in my enjoyment of those things and their related activities.

Depends on the hobby. If it's something I'm going to use regularly or where the quality of the tool directly affects the quality of the experience or the finished result, then I try to get something at the inflection point of the price curve where the tangent is around one. As an example, I won't buy Lie-Nielsen or even Veritas hand planes, but I won't buy some vintage Soviet shit off the local equivalent of Craigslist or anything from the DIY big box stores either. But Dick or the house brands of two dedicated local carpentry stores are usually at the right price point.

If it's some random one-off task, I go the Hazard Fraught route and buy the cheapest tool that will do the job. Right now I am on vacation in the mountains and I've bought literally the cheapest hiking shoes I could find. They and my feet held up well.

It varies wildly with the hobby. I've found hobbies where I should just buy the thing day one (Weightlifting), where others all the upgrades are just lifestyle stuff and marketing scams (Golf). When I first started lifting I found a 1 inch (as opposed to Olympic) barbell that was just solid with no rotation, and used shitty old sand-filled plates. It was a real hassle, but I made myself use it for two years before I'd spring for a real barbell and cheap squat stands. It turned out to be a massive waste of energy not having the proper equipment and doing things wrong. On the flipside, I've spent an embarrassing amount on golf clubs over the years in dribs and drabs here and there, I still suck and to add insult to injury the clubs I hit best are still the thrift store Ping Zing Irons I have from the 80s or 90s. This, in spite of all the marketing and industry around upgraded golf clubs which are basically unnecessary. Some heuristics:

-- The "Boots Theory"

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

Buying inferior products over and over to avoid the big spend on the higher tier product can often end up costing you more money. While I'm a big fan of spending as little as possible to try out a hobby, once you are ready to spend money, don't be afraid to spend. When I took up rock climbing, spending money on the little climbing shoes seemed stupid. But renting them at $5-10 a visit would have cost more than a cheap pair of shoes within ten visits. After the first visit, I bought a used pair for $10, wore those until they were completely useless, then bought a real pair.

-- Don't fall into the morality trap of feeling guilty that someone is better than you with worse equipment. Yes, we've all heard tales of blues masters who learned to play guitar by tying clothesline over a cigar box, we've all seen the jacked guys who do bodyweight only exercises, guys who hiked the Appalachian trail barefoot with a pillowcase over their shoulder etc. That's probably not you, and it doesn't need to be you, if you need something to enjoy or learn a hobby, there's no reason not to spend the money to prove a point. I've definitely punished myself for needing more than X, when X is better than me, but nobody ever gave me kudos for it. It doesn't matter that you bought a better bike and you're still not as fast as a guy with a worse bike, nobody notices, and if they do they're probably just haters anyway, you're doing them a favor giving them something to hate on.

-- Try to assess "Tiers" of products/equipment as accurately as possible. For barbells, in my experience, there's junk/toy products (solid barbells with no spin), there's really cheap (will bend with 100kg loads), there's Good (Solid spin, will hold up to regular use at 200kg for powerlifts), there's superlative (Eleiko barbells that will safely hold 300kg loads and drop 200kg from overhead). Price wise, getting to Good does it for most individuals forever, going below it is pointless your savings will be washed out later, going above it will double the price without delivering any benefit unless you're running an Oly gym. Find the tier where you can do everything you need to, not the one where you're spending money for the sake of it.

-- Pay it forward, when you're done with your old stuff find another young hobbyist and give it to them as a gift. You'll get more out of the warm fuzzies than you will out of the small amount of money.

-- Don't spend money on hobbies because you think you "should" like them. See eg, my golf clubs, I keep feeling like golf is something I should be better at, but I just don't care enough about it and probably never will, I might have finally just accepted sucking, but maybe next year I'll worry about it again. See also, as a sub-hobby, I wasted money on a lot of outdoor rock climbing equipment when I got into indoor rock climbing, because I felt like I should do the cool part, but at the end of the day I'm a bitch-ass gym bunny not an outdoor guy. It just eats up too much time, I maybe go outside once or twice a year. Now I've got a grand sunk in all kinds of outdoor bullshit I could have just borrowed from a buddy the few times I wanted to go.

-- You can have the best equipment in the world, if you don't want to do it you won't. I literally grew up in a house with a piano no one knew how to play. We still don't.

Yeah. You can often minmax in some ways. Take road bikes. A bike that was good enough for Tour de France riders in 2012 is not that much worse than what the guys in the Tour are riding now, and it's usually much better than anything you could get new for that price. Tires, however...get the best ones money can buy, or at least don't skimp. Same for shoes.

As for weight lifting: the bottom tier item is literally just some heavy-ass rocks lifted in the woods and a tree branch for pullups.

Depending on the specifics of the hobby, you may be able to use something along the lines of the Ken Rockwell justification, which goes something like "if you have the capital and choose wisely, buying an expensive (used) camera can be almost free -- since you can sell it later for at least what you paid".

This doesn't apply to anything electronics related, but may work for bikes and knives -- collectable cars, guitars, guns and quality tools could also have a case made.

The trouble with it is that it relies on you actually selling the stuff later instead of just letting it accumulate, but is easily rationalized around. The real key is that if you have nice tools, you can't blame them for your own deficiencies.

I tell myself this every time I buy a new gun.

Remember, it’s not a loss till you sell!

I strongly lean towards the "A bad carpenter blames his tools" and "The magic is in the artist's hand not the paintbrush" camp and think that when partaking in a hobby the "right" way to do things is to practice frugality in the initial stages and upgrade the equipment as you grow out not in.

There's truth to this, and in the past, I tended to think the same. But now I believe that's not the best way of starting. The problem is that the beginning carpenter doesn't know what or whom to blame, so spending enough money on the tools to be reasonably certain that it's indeed you who sucks, and that you can work on your technique, is very valuable. Also, this cuts out on some sources of frustration, and can keep you motivated.

At least that's what I found for anything handcraft related. YMMV.

Bought a good gaming setup with a good GPU, Mouse, and 120Hz monitor after years of gaming on a shitty setup.

That's about my only expensive hobby (well, expensive by Third World standards), and I never bought all that stuff with the expectation it would significantly improve my in-game performance, just that it would be nice to have, and fuck it, I'm an adult with no dependents, I can buy it if I want to. Someone like Ninja or Landmark playing on a 2016 toaster could probably spank my ass with no end of high end gear, but I still like it when I remember, yeah, spending a ridiculous sum on my pc makes things look fucking amazing.

That's not to say that I'm not frugal in general (though I have a great deal more need to be, being the poor son of well-off parents, and I know how hard my dad works for his money so I don't even try and mooch off him anymore, I just feel too ashamed about it)

Actually, that's the closest I have to an irrational aversion to spending, my dad could spend a great deal more and not really care, but barring things I would be very hard pressed to afford myself, like a car or house, I rarely can bring myself to ask him to buy me stuff these days.

In your case, I would suggest having either an explicit or implicit carve out from your monthly income you consider "luxury" expenses, and when it's filled, you tell yourself you've planned for this and won't miss it. You get to tell your brain you're being disciplined, while still enjoying yourself, because presumably you're making enough money that discretionary spending isn't something that is a real financial concern.

Most of the time I’m pretty frugal when it comes to my hobbies (my goal for the “hobbies” line item in my budget is $100/month or less); however, I do think it’s worthwhile to spend more on better equipment if it means you’ll spend more time on that hobby or get more enjoyment out of it. For example, when I first started sailing with my boyfriend I didn’t have the proper gear (wetsuit, footwear, etc) and was often wet and cold. The next season I spent the money on two wetsuits even though I knew I wouldn’t use them more than a few months that year, but my enjoyment of the activity went way up because I was comfortable and my hands weren’t getting torn up from the lines because I bought proper well-fitting gloves. Likewise, I know I cycle more than I would otherwise because I like my bike and it’s comfortable to ride. There is something to be said about waiting to invest in good equipment until you know you enjoy the activity and will engage in it often, but sometimes the equipment is the limiting factor and can needlessly put a person off.

However, I do enjoy being a bit of a cheapskate and if you can make secondhand work for you, or get away with skimping on certain things without impacting your enjoyment or usage, then why wouldn’t you want to save the money?

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