What's Like Being a Cheapskate?

What’s Like being a cheapskate?

Most of you reading this blog might be surfing the net on an old laptop that you have been using for 5 years. Well, good for you! I am writing this blog on an old Toshiba Satellite 31CDT that has been my faithful companion for 3 years now. And yes, it was already 2nd hand when I bought it. I don’t own any portable MP3 player like the Apple iPod or Creative Zen, but I do have a Nokia 3300 cellphone which I doubled as an MP3 player as soon as I slapped a cheap generic brand 1gb MMC on it. However, I can most certainly afford to buy a brand new 80Gb iPod Video whenever I want to, but what the hell would I do with it? My Laptop’s Hard drive is only 20Gb, so I don’t really have that much of a collection to upload to it. I only buy things that I need. That’s the best thing you can do to save money. Even if I wanted to buy something, I would first consider the choices that I have. Taking the Apple iPod again as an example, the market is saturated with a myriad of alternatives. There’s the Microsoft Zune, the Sony PSP that can also play music files as well as play games, and let’s not forget the cheap Taiwanese variants. The question now becomes how much am I willing to spend and what are the features that I need? You may spend more depending in what features you are looking for. You may opt to buy a cheaper product, but if that product doesn’t have much of a quality and gets broken easily, you may find yourself spending more in the long run. This is specially true on buying sensitive equipments like most electronic gadgets.

For me, being a cheapskate doesn’t mean you have to prefer on buying cheap products every time. Yes I want to save money, but I also want to make the fullest out of every cent that I take out of my pocket. If it means pulling out more bills from my wallet, it’s ok, as long as I can have a durable and reliable product that fits my needs…. my very basic needs. :)