Dear Frugality Police: I Just Spent $3,000 on Music Gear

Hello loyal followers. I have a confession: I just spent nearly three thousand hard-earned American dollars on music gear. Do I need to turn in my frugality card? Am I still allowed to be a personal finance blogger? How ashamed should I be in myself?

Let’s back up.

Quality vs. Quantity

People don’t really ever ask me about my views on the whole quantity vs. quality situation but that’s because people aren’t nearly philosophical enough in their daily thoughts. People generally don’t ask me all sorts of things I want to talk about. I guess that’s why this blog exists.

Anyway.

I have a lot of thoughts on quality vs. quantity and what I think the best way is to go about making a purchase.

We always have three toggles in our heads when making a purchasing decision: Price, quality, and quantity. If you have a set price you’re wanting to pay you have to decide whether you want to sacrifice quality or quantity.

It looks like this…

If quality goes up then either your price will go up or your quantity will go down. If quantity goes up you either have to decrease the quality or your price will go up. You get the idea.

Am I quality over quantity or vice versa?

Answer: Neither. Sort of.

Okay. So here we are. Generally speaking, I tend to land on the side of quality over quantity but it’s really not a good question. In some cases, it’s much better to be a quality person. In other situations, quantity is more important.

What we’re looking for is the intersection where quality and quantity come together to form the perfect union of usability for our particular circumstance. We’ll call this value. I’m interested in finding that sweet spot where quality, quantity, and price intersect to give me the best value.

It looks like this…

By messing with the Quality, Quantity, and Price toggles the Value toggle is automatically moved up or down.

Because of the law of diminishing returns, you quickly lose value in something once the quantity goes up to more than you need. For instance, if I’m hungry I might really value one hamburger. I’ll value the second hamburger slightly less (or significantly less depending on how many hamburgers I can eat.) I will hardly value the tenth hamburger at all.

So if I had $20 to spend on hamburgers it would NOT make sense to buy twenty hamburgers off the dollar menu.

I’d get a better value out of my money by buying one or two higher quality hamburgers instead of twenty low-quality hamburgers since I can only eat a couple of hamburgers anyway.

Depending on how hungry I am I can dial up or dial down the necessary quantity to fulfill my need and then buy the highest quality hamburger(s) that would fulfill my hunger needs.

So that’s all pretty straightforward. We just naturally do this in our daily lives. We’re constantly playing the quantity vs. quality with everything and attempting to arrive at the place where we receive the most value.

Since this is ostensibly a personal finance blog let’s throw another toggle into the mix—frugality.

Hmm. How does frugality play a part in the quantity vs. quality discussion? I’m glad you are so interested.

So in the hamburger situation, we ask ourselves a couple of pretty straightforward questions.

1. How many hamburgers do I need to eat?
2. How much money can I spend?

Now we’re going to add a new toggle, the frugality toggle. With the frugality toggle in play, we ask ourselves a third question (or we slightly tweak the second question depending on how you want to look at it).

3. What’s the least amount I can spend while still fulfilling my needs and without noticeably sacrificing quality?

With the hamburger question, I know I have $20 I can spend but maybe I can spend even less and still get essentially the same value.

Many people don’t ever ask themselves this third question.

Without the frugality toggle in play people will see they have a $20 bill in their pocket so they’ll spend twenty dollars. When you think about maximizing value through frugality you start asking questions like, “How much of these twenty dollars do I have to part with?” Instead of questions like “How can I get the most amount of hamburger joy with my twenty dollars?”

Once we get outside of the realm of food, at least for me, the quantity question is almost always either a one or a zero. Many people get themselves into trouble by not reigning in their desired quantity of something.

Take guitars for instance.

Many guitar players wake up one day to find they own seven or eight guitars. They’re never satisfied and are always looking at the next guitar to buy. Sounds glorious. But also, expensive.

I’ve decided I need one acoustic guitar and one electric guitar. So my quantity is stuck at two. This makes life much easier when deciding whether or not I should spend a bunch of time researching which guitar I should get next. I want several guitars but I need zero additional guitars. I know a new guitar would cost a bunch of money without providing much additional value to my life.

Being frugal—and kind of a minimalist at heart—makes life easier because I’m much more likely to decide I need a quantity of zero of something in my life.

Without the frugality toggle, I’d see I have some extra money saved up and would immediately start looking for something to buy. A prerequisite for the frugality toggle is the purchase has to be pretty close to a need, not just a want.

But sometimes I need a quantity of more than zero. So I have to worry about getting a good value for my money. Once I figure out I do actually need something I start playing with the frugality toggle. The frugality toggle combined with the quality toggle will give me a better sense of how to reach the maximum value for my money.

So, $3,000 Worth of Music Gear

I’ve been playing music for years but have never tried to monetize my hobby. I want to start playing in bars and restaurants as a way to make some additional income. In order to do this, I needed to purchase some equipment like a PA system, mixer, microphones, cables, etc. Suffice to say I have spent a personally painful amount of money on my hobby of playing music in the last few weeks.

Did I temporarily lose my mind and completely go against the Burrito Bowl ethos of frugality above all? Maybe. But I don’t think so. I spent a lot of time researching what equipment I actually needed vs. what equipment I just thought was cool. Value was my end goal so I’d tweak the quality and frugality toggles until I reached a point that I felt I was getting the highest quality of gear I could without overextending myself. What I ended up with was an acceptable intersection of value for my money.

Being frugal doesn’t mean going with the cheapest option. Frugality means going with the option that provides the most value. 

Doing this exercise of toggling frugality and quality helped me take the plunge and purchase the right gear without feeling like I was betraying my frugality oath.

Also, and not completely inconsequential, this gear allows me to turn my hobby of playing music into a side hustle. So, the hard-earned dollars I parted with in exchange for this gear is more like an investment in myself.

It’s a constant battle of not letting the flood gates of spending to open up too widely. Once I made the decision to make a large purchase it became far too easy to add things to my list that I didn’t necessarily need.

It also became harder to say ‘no’ to other non-music purchases. The momentum of spending isn’t really a separate toggle to play with, just something to be aware of. There are still a few pieces of gear I want to buy but I’m cooling my spending heels for a few weeks to see if I really need those extra items or if I just think they’re neat.

Anyway. The frugality police can jog on. I’m keeping my frugality card despite my recent purchases. If you’re in Northwest Montana maybe you’ll see me out playing music, desperately attempting to claw back some of this investment.

Key Takeaway

If you’re debating on a purchase don’t just automatically go with the cheapest option because you think it’s the most frugal play. Also, don’t just automatically go with the most expensive option you can afford. Try to find that sweet spot where the frugality toggle and the quality toggle give you the most value for your money.

Hopefully, that makes sense.

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