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What funny is that if you rent a car once a month for $150, people will say something like "WOW, THAT'S SO EXPENSIVE, YOU SHOULD BUY A CAR INSTEAD". Except that insurances alone on a car would cost me $150 per month.

People prefer owning and bleeding money where the cost gets spread over time than to pay a smaller amount in lump sums when they need the service.

I lived the no car/short-term rental car life for eight years when I lived in Seattle. I would use bike & public transit to get around the city, but if I wanted to go out to the mountains I would need to rent a car (or carpool with a friend who owned a car).

The truth is it's different psychologically to spend $150 on going out to the mountains instead of the marginal cost of driving out to the mountains in a car you already own. Yeah you can be like but that's not rational with X Y Z reasons all you want but the actual decision experience becomes "do I want to spend $150 today on going to the mountains", which is matched up against any other thing I could do that day for much cheaper, and still have a fair bit of fun. $150 would buy you & someone else dinner at a very nice restaurant! Hell, it would nearly buy a round-trip plane ticket from Seattle to Palm Springs to visit Joshua Tree NP.

Also relevant is that the fun of using the car is offset against the pain of the rental experience. Buying a car means having that experience once. Renting means having it every time you want to rent.

That's the thing though. Recurring payments hide the cost from you and it hides the fact are making a choice by owning a car instead of going to a nice restaurant every month.

Paying for stuff only when you use it puts the costs in your face and puts you in control of your spendings.

Sure, but are you optimizing for "utility" or happiness? There are definitely circumstances where you can be happier "wasting money" than not.

My point is orthogonal to "utility vs happiness". Let's say someone spends $5 on starbucks per day, I just want them to realize that's $1800 per year and so they're really making the choice between a coffee per day and an RTX 3090 every year. Or a $150 bottle of wine per month. Once you accept you are indeed making a choice, then you have the power to consciously choose what you want to splurge on.

But it's ignoring the human psychology involved. "Ignorance is bliss" is true. Yes ok, I could have invested in $GOOG and earned a bunch of money that would be worth more to me today, but that just isn't how we process information. What happens instead is that I buy the coffee because I want it and now I can't even enjoy it because I know it's "stupid."

I'm in the process of fixing up a house and while I have a station wagon, it doesn't have the capacity of a pickup truck.

Friend after friend jokes about how their truck is more useful, but the one time I really needed one (to purchase a refrigerator) it cost $19 + fuel from Lowes and that was that.

It was quite a nice way to do things.

I offer this only because I'm a native English speaker and found the typo confusing: "first tier brakes" are very good brakes, "first tire/tyre breaks" is when your first set of tyres fails. I'm quite sure you meant the latter, there's a lot of ESL on HN so I thought I'd offer a translation.

The magical way to alleviate this is to be okay with most things being kinda shitty. While it's very hard and expensive to optimize at above 80%, it is relatively easy and cheap to keep alright stuff working at an okayish condition.

This is surprisingly hard for some people (including myself) to do.

I make my work high quality, and I want to spend the time I have using things that are well designed and well thought out. In some small way I hope that seeing those things will inspire me to keep my quality up. It’s extra work, but I think that allowing things in one area of my life to be “kinda shitty” will creep into other areas of my life.

How I’ve dealt with this is just doing less. I live in a smaller, more maintainable house. I drive nice, but not luxury, cars that I can afford to keep maintained (both in the sense of time and money), and while I have hobbies (wife says too many), I go for nice gear that is a good value and easily maintainable, that I can resell if I need to.

That’s not to say the most expensive is the best, but I find Kinda shitty comes with the cost of our initial research, purchase, downtime after it breaks or just a less safe/enjoyable experience, trying to get out of the first thing by selling it with a low resale value, then re-purchasing a nicer thing.

I guess my metric is: if I can’t afford to pay for it in cash and don’t have the time or money to maintain it, I probably shouldn’t be buying it - or I should be getting rid of something if I do.

I think you mean Opportunity cost?

> In microeconomic theory, the opportunity cost of a particular activity option is the loss of value or benefit that would be incurred (the cost) by engaging in that activity, relative to engaging in an alternative activity offering a higher return in value or benefit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost?wprov=sfti1

>I think you mean Opportunity cost?

No, I'd say the gp is talking more about "hidden TCO" (Total Cost of Ownership).

Opportunity Cost is about finite time which forces the choice of one action to come at the expense of other alternative actions.

Hidden TCO is being ignorant of auxiliary costs of the base products (accessories, maintenance, etc.) An extreme example of that is a "free puppy" can become one of the most expensive items to own especially when you're uneducated about the true TCO of dogs. I.e. In addition to obvious vet bills, going on a vacation now means you have to pay for a dog sitter which you didn't initially account for. Owning recreational boats is another example of hidden TCO.

> A good example is when you get a bicycle, you do the equation and realize that within two years you will have saved in on the cost of public transportation.

This is more a counterexample.

I bought a bike eighteen months ago, it's my only transportation, it sits outside in the rain, and so far I have spent €0 on it. It's a good bike, but by no means an expensive bike.

> But it's when you start using it you realize that suddenly you always end up sweaty arriving to work so you need to buy good ventilated outdoor clothes

I don't get sweaty walking somewhere. Why should I get sweaty biking?

If you treat biking as transportation and not a race, you won't get sweaty.

> then your first tier brakes

I'm not quite sure what you mean, but I assume you mean you need maintenance. Well, don't buy tools, go to a bike shop. They can do it quicker and better than you can, and it will cost very little - certainly a tiny fraction of what car maintenance is.

I got a bike to _simplify_ my life and it has worked.

> If you treat biking as transportation and not a race, you won't get sweaty.

That’s only true if you live in a flat region, are never in a hurry, never wear rain clothing, and never dress even slightly too warm. My bike commute has some very minor hills, and it’s virtually impossible for me to not get at least somewhat sweaty. And I view bikes purely as a pragmatic transportation vehicle — not a bike enthusiast.