Do you ever spend way too long before buying something that makes your life easier? It’s kind of like this cartoon:

But instead of just splurging all the time on books, it’s more about sticking with the broke mentality in the other panels over things. I have made life way more difficult than it needed to be sometimes by not making a purchase.

I’m talking about times I’ve stubbornly refused to buy what I really did need.

Example A: The Car Phone Holder 

Now, as an older millennial, all this cool tech we live with has sort of grown organically with me my whole life. However, at times it’s grown faster than my paycheck did. Because of that, I’m often a late adopter of technology. If I’ve learned anything from my smartphone, it’s that I did like 100% fine without it until 2011, but I’m completely hooked on the thing now.

So, speaking of smartphones, I had a car holder and it broke. The suction cup just gave up on life and that thing would fall into the driver side and passenger side of my car and I would try to tug it back toward me by the charging cable while driving with like a 60% success rate of getting the phone into my lap versus the phone snagging on something and pulling itself off the charger and sliding under a seat, never to be seen again until I pull over, fish it out, and in a pile of sheer denial, put it back in the car phone holder and reattach it to the windshield, while thinking, this time it’ll stay.

After finally throwing out the broken car phone holder, I have also precariously balanced the phone on the steering wheel shaft, while nudging it with my hands as I drive to keep it balanced there, especially whenever turning.

As a last ditch effort, I created my own car phone holder once by super gluing a vent air freshener to one of the drunk-octopus-wants-to-fight coat hooks to hold my phone (this one was particularly early on in the smartphone ownership and I hadn’t even seen vent car phone holders on sale yet).

The lengths of effort I have gone through to avoid buying a car phone holder have been insane.

I was in Five Below recently and saw them on sale there. Proper car phone holders. I had to convince myself to spend the $5 to fix the problem. Still in full denial, I attached the new car phone holder to the vent and slapped the magnet between my case and the phone and that sucker attached immediately. No more nudging the phone with my thumbs during turns to keep it upright or playing the world’s most dangerous fishing game.

And in that moment, I felt like Homer Simpson.

D’oh. $5 and my life would’ve been way easier.

Example B: The Electric Blanket

Another d’oh money moment I had this past year was over an electric blanket. I live in an RV and for three months of the year, I live in that RV at Lincoln Center. It gets cold. Really, really cold.

Everyone told me it would. Everyone who has already done a season at Lincoln Center warned me about several things I should do in advance to prepare, which included buying a good electric blanket.

Time passed. It got colder and colder. I shivered more and more. I reached a point where the only time I was ever warm was standing directly in front of a heating vent at work. But electric blankets seemed expensive.

So, I started sleeping terribly, because my feet would freeze and I would have to curl up in a very specific little ball that wasn’t all that comfortable to keep my feet close enough to my body to stay warm, no matter how many socks I put on.

Finally, one night, I snapped. Around 3 AM on day who-knows-what, I went to the 24 hour Duane Reade to see if they had an electric blanket. They did not. They did have a large heating pad I bought and threw into bed with me that allowed me to get some sleep.

The next day I went to Bed, Bath & Beyond and bought their queen sized electric blanket. It was nearly $200. That night I slept like a baby. I woke up feeling like a human again and kicked myself for suffering through most of a month freezing. It cost me a ton anyway, but I didn’t even get a full season’s use out of it because I was too stubborn to take other people’s advice about what I needed to survive the Lincoln Center tundra.

When I’m being stingy about my purchases now, I try to think, is this a car phone situation, Mel? Cause that was ridiculous and unsafe. Is this an electric blanket situation, Mel? Where people who know more than you have told you repeatedly you will need this item anyway and now you’re just suffering for no reason? If the answer is yes, it’s time to go find the item.

Also, if you don’t wait till you’re already freezing to death and in desperate need, you can do some easy cost hacks, like, for pete’s sake, I went to Bed, Bath & Beyond without a coupon! Is there a store that has more coupons? Or I could’ve price shopped on the internet and used a savings portal like eBates. I could’ve checked out eBay.

D’oh.

Have you ever put off buying something you shouldn’t have?