Carl Richards is a Certified Financial Planner™ and creator of the Sketch Guy column, appearing weekly in The New York Times since 2010.  The following article is reproduced with permission from his weekly newsletter and his website can be found here.

Greetings, Carl here.

If you want to spend less, try spending more.

I know that sounds crazy, but it works. And I know it works because I’ve experienced it many times.

In the early 2000s, my wife and I didn’t have a lot of extra money. But we loved to ski, and we needed new ski pants. I had my eye on a pair of ski bibs from a high-end company called Moonstone. The bibs were clearly well-made, but they were just over $300 per pair.

According to conventional wisdom, we should have been buying $50 Walmart pants instead. But I just had this gut feeling that we should buy the Moonstones. So we saved and saved and saved, and finally bought them.

Two decades later… we still have them. In fact, when my kids go skiing, they grab the Moonstone bibs because they are still the best ski pants we own!

I can almost guarantee you that if I had bought the $50 pants from Walmart, they would have been gone before the end of the first season. At one pair per year, I would have had to buy those $50 pants at least 20 times by now. That’s more than three times what I spent on the “expensive” Moonstone pants. And on top of that, I would have had to deal with all the cognitive, emotional, and logistical drain of perpetually having to replace the old pants.

The obvious retort to this is, “But Carl, I don’t have enough money to buy the nice thing.”

What I’m trying to tell you is that you can’t afford the cheap thing because you’re going to have to buy it 20 times!

So save up until you can buy the nice thing once. I know it hurts at first… but trust me, in the long run, it’s worth it.

-Carl

P.S. As always, if you want to use this week’s sketch, you can buy it here.