The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness. Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Vimes#Boots_theory_of_soci...

If the cost of most things depended only on quality then I'd find it more convincing, but especially when we're talking about consumer electronics, things like brand reputation, novelty, and user perception matter a lot.

Buying a house is often much better financially than renting (in high cost of living areas, usually by a factor)

Hardwood furniture can last several generations. Plywood stuff...not so much.

Mutual funds have much lower fees if you invest a larger amount of money. Banks and credit unions give you more, cheaper services if you have more money. Borrowing money is cheaper the better off you are.

You can get a better job if you can afford to be on the market for longer.

And so on, and so forth. There are exceptions (my cheap ikea couch has lasted 10-15 years, while a fancy hardwood table we got started falling apart after just a few years), but you just have more options if you can afford more expensive stuff. Some of those options are vastly more cost-effective. Being poor is very expensive.

To be clear, I don't think it's strictly wrong, just that it adds nothing of value to a conversation. It just gives a very specific example of when a rule holds.

It's kind of like if the employment statistics come out, and they show improvement, but someone comments that they just got laid off that week. They aren't wrong, but they're also not adding anything to the conversation.

That is not the point, and the comment you’re replying to gave some very real, serious examples as to why not. Cost of living alone eats an incredible amount of your budget unless you’re very well to do, so there, immediately, you’re out of “sometimes” territory. We’re already in “the majority of most people’s budget” land. Then you have payday loans, any kind of loan in general, late fees, etc: all of these are costs to low liquidity. Unexpected expenses cannot be absorbed if you have no cash nor assets to sell. Being poor is expensive; this is not a random anecdote, it’s a fundamental character flaw in our society that has been consistently identified and documented. Google “the cost of being poor” for more reading material than one could process in a lifetime.

If you’re talking about the specific example in the quote, alone: it’s an illustration, to make a complex and ugly point understandable and palatable and easy to digest. It’s not a random data point: it illustrates the mechanism by which being poor is expensive. That’s not straight forward to intuit, hence this example has merit.

this has not been true for a long time by now. If it were true there would be no mass market for tourism and no budget for so many people to buy iphones every year or two. By far we all earn way more than what we strictly need to live, even in your first jobs in your twenties.

That assumes rich people actually participate. They could also just buy cheap things over and over because they can. I like to do that so I'm not too emotionally and financially attached to possessions, which becomes a liability and a worry.

Not any more, especially in the global cities. You are better off investing your money on the stock market.

When I last rented (in a very high cost of living area), my rent was 2500 and I was faced with a 300/month increase on the renewal of my lease.

I bought a place in an area that is roughly an (almost) as high in demand. Much nicer, 3 times the size. The mortgage was 2000/month. Add taxes and HoA and It's about 3000/month. There is some maintenance and I have to pay for my own repair, so my housing budget is about 3500 a month.

That was several years ago. I can look up the listing for the apartment I used to rent (large building, lots of units on the same floor with the same plan and they have a website). It hovers between 3000 and 3500/month these days.

Except I can deduct about $5000/year in taxes from my mortgage interest and the property taxes (though starting this year I won't be able to do the later anymore because of caps). And on that 3500/month I pay for housing, about $1500ish goes in principal. So effectively, the place costs me about 1500-1600/month. Add that property value is up drastically in the area over the last few years, and I'm living here somewhere between "for free" and "at a profit". That's a heck of a lot cheaper than renting.

There was the matter of the downpayment. I got pretty lucky in some of my stock investments, but the above is hard to beat (and the only reason I have so much money to invest IS because of how much cheaper my housing is now compared to what it would be). Oh, the condo association is letting me stick a solar array on the roof, which is also a fine investment even with the new tariffs. Landlord wouldn't have allowed it. If I ever need to leave or cash in, I can flip the place on the market in a day (well, plus like a month for the closing I guess). I can rent it too for a sweet added profit.

All in all, renting is expensive as hell.

Having also recently bought a house, my repayments are comparable to rent, and double up as an investment.

Most likely, the person who can afford the pricier boots and tells you they last longer than yours just needs to use them less, but justifies his decision because it was actually true back in his father's day. Economic inequality is a huge issue right now, sure. But information assymetry is also doing a lot of damage. I can get a spec sheet on 2 motherboards and get about all the information I need from them for a purchasing decision. You can't do that with boots at Walmart in this scenario.

More, if you want shoes to last a long time, I have found nothing beats having multiple sets and not wearing the same shoes constantly. I have not empirically studies this, though. So, if anyone has, I'd be delighted to see the results. I just know that if I buy an expensive set of shoes for me, they last about 6 months if I constantly wear them. I can, of course, resole them. But they are not magically doing better than the cheaper shoes I can also buy. Rotating shoes so that I wear a different set day to day makes a huge difference in how long they last.

Cheap quality shoes can be better than premium brand 'quality' shoes these days.

I mentioned sweaters from CVS because I bought one for ~$9 and the seams are coming apart after about 8 months, but it seems like it will be easy to fix because it was made in such a simple way.

Given that you have some experience, do you have any resources you can recommend? Maybe a good book with a bunch of the fundamental skills?

This, a thousand times over. Shoe trees also do wonders to extend the life of footwear. It's all about letting the shoe completely dry out between wears.

Generally speaking that's true, though I wear the crap out of my Birkenstocks and they still seem good.

After that I had a pair of Walmart flip-flops that lasted only half the time under similar use but they were 1/10th the price.

Before that I had a pair of no-name not flip-flop (i.e., velcro strap) sandals that lasted nearly 6 years of fairly continual use.

There is no particular moral or conclusion here, they are just anecdotes. I just think you can't make any general rule about "it's better to buy quality than cheap" or vice-versa: it's all situation specific and depends on the quantitative costs and lifetimes.

There are many examples of "it's expensive to be poor". There also many examples of where it's not, and how people have what would have been considered a very high standard of living in the past on minimal output. Many not poor people are also definitely not doing the boot anecdote thing posits: they aren't buying one set of boots and wearing them their entire lifetime. They aren't buying one set of hardwood furniture they use from their 20s until they die and they aren't buying a quality vehicle and running it for 20 years on synthetic oil.

This was back when I walked about two to five miles a day. Just in the office, the same shoes can last much longer.

For that matter, most of the change has been in the wet season. I wouldn't be surprised to find the shoes flat out wear faster in that environment.