Yeah, that’s a matter of values. I think the “penny wise and pound foolish” refers to a single choice/action that saves a small amount of money in one way while simultaneously costing a large amount of money in another way. pullin posted a fine example: his wife insisted on keeping the outside lights off, which saved a few bucks on electricity but at the same time ended up costing thousand dollars in car repair bills.
A lady who chooses to be frugal in some aspects of daily life (as by washing/reusing plastic bags) but lavish in other aspects (taking the family out to a four-star restaurant) is making a conscious decision to choose priorities. That’s two separate value-based decisions and no one else can rightly say whether they are smart or dumb (as opposed to a single decision that factually does or does not save money when all of its consequences are considered).
A woman I used to work with (the same one who said she had to drink mild while she was pregnant so she could breast feed her baby) had fours kids in 5 years.
She said she couldn’t afford birth control.
I wasn’t going to do this one but since you started it–when they melted down the silver dollars into bullets and actually did some damage to Pennywise I couldn’t help thinking “Pennywise was dollar dumb.” He was attuned enough to the kids, he should have known what they were up to.
In my line of work I might spend upwards of $40,000 defending a case that returns a jury verdict of $5,000 just so I don’t have to pay an inflated demand of $30,000. It looks pound foolish on its face, but it keeps the local plaintiff bar on their toes and makes them more responsive to reasonable settlement offers in many other cases. We consider it the cost of education. In the long run we spend less on claims AND defense combined.
I have a back yard garden. I spend way more on seeds and water than I would on store-bought produce. It’s only going to be a gain for me if the store is selling poisoned food.
My company has eliminated many positions in my department such that we have gone from 5 people with a manager to 1 full time and 2 part time people with a manager. So guess who now is handling ALL of the work. Guess who is complaining about the over time.
Inventory and clean up days are another stupid decison. They want to pay me time and a half to come in and wipe down the racks, you want to pay me time and a half to count widgets when I don’t know a widget 1.0 from a widget 2.0. It is a ridiculous waste of time and money. (My time and their money) I am good at what I do so I earn my pay.
Colophon, are we related? My Dad would park miles away from anything. I threw a shit fit once when he took the family to the symphony-it was raining, we were dressed up, and he started that park a mile away crap. Huge fight.
My poor mother. Years ago the Steelers played at Pitt Stadium, which was on a huge hill. He would park about 3 miles away, almost to the river, and make her walk up to the game.
And of course, he always left everything early to avoid the traffic. He was actually pissed at my high school graduation because I couldn’t leave until everyone had their diploma.
And DummyGladHands, in post #45, tells of the same trait in his father.
I have a friend who is just the same. He’s a prodigious cheapskate, and will go to grotesque lengths to genuinely save small amounts of money. With the paying-for-parking thing, though, ethics comes into the picture for him: he strongly believes that it’s immoral for any person / undertaking / community to charge money for parking, so he’s ready, on principle, to spend more money on petrol hunting around for a free parking space, than he would on paying for parking. How far he and his passengers have to walk from / to the free parking spot, is quite immaterial to him.
I’m a teacher. At my school, there’s never enough money to buy anything but the cheapest student chairs… which then need to be replaced a year or two later because they break so easily :smack:
The sad thing is, my school is far from alone on this one. If we were allowed to “borrow” against our future budget for furnishings and materials, we could buy decent chairs that would last for years and end up spending less, but this is Not Allowed.
I receive a lot of ads in the spring time advertising high efficiency windows with claims of saving 30% on high summer utility bills and 3-5 year paybacks. A few years ago I called a company and they sent someone out to pitch me.
I dug out some old bills and did some math and found that 30% total annual electricity savings for 5 years would be $2700. As a walk-in retail customer at a few window companies with local showrooms I found that I would pay around $3600 for materials to do the job. I expected to get a quote for around $5,000 which would be around a 10 year payback, but could still be a reasonably good deal. Their quote was $17,000
Governments are notorious for that kind of thinking - my husband works for a construction management company, and they often bid for city work. Their track record with the city is getting the job done on time and on budget without needing to come back over and over again and fix things that were done wrong, but the city still has to tender everything to bid and take the cheapest bids. I can understand the need to tender everything, but being required to take the cheapest bid means that you get what you pay for, and when we’re talking about things like bridges, that’s a terrible idea.
My Dad once had a holiday job as a student, working for the local government road maintenance department.
His job? Smashing machinery.
You see, next year’s machinery budget was determined by how much of this years was used. If they finished with anything left over, then obviously they didn’t need the money, right, so next year the allowance got cut to what had actually been used. So, at the end of every year, they spent the remaining money on new equipment, then hired some teenagers to break it, otherwise when something expensive broke down, they didn’t have the budget to replace it…
A long time ago when a local factory was installing a new machine, someone at Head Office earned himself a pat on the back when he realised that a custom built feeder-thingy for the new machine would cost several thousand dollars less than the standard one from the machine’s manufacturer.
Now, decades later, every time it needs maintenance it has to have parts custom made for it at great expense. The gaskets alone cost them more per year then what they saved in the initial installation. Worse, if they have a bad run and several gaskets are damaged in a short time and they run through all the spare gaskets they keep on hand, the machine has to sit idle while new ones are ordered, manufactured and delivered. This costs tens of thousands of dollars per day in lost manufacturing time.
Actually, people say this a lot, but often no, your time isn’t really worth that much, because it’s not time you would have been making money anyway. If you work from 9-5, making $100 an hour, then at 7 PM you spend an hour to save yourself $10, you couldn’t have worked instead, made $100, and kept $90. You didn’t have the option of whether to work for normal pay or save the $10.
Now, whether that’s a good use of your time can still be questioned, but to suggest that time you would not normally be working has the same value as time you are working is a false assumption. Not every hour of a person’s time has the same monetary value; this fluctuates depending on what they have the capacity to be doing at that particular moment, and the majority of people can’t just choose to put in an extra hour at their job that day so they can hire someone to mow the lawn for them, for instance.
