Look how nice these engineered wood floors look! You’ll save $10 total for the whole house! And the best part? When they get damaged, you can’t refinish them so you get to rip them out and get a whole new floor!
Veneer floors, what’ll they think of next?
Pretty much.
So in our new (to us) house we wanted to make it more energy-efficient and part of that is re-sealing & caulking the beams, it’s a partial timber-frame. One company we consulted wanted to also do the entire tongue-and-groove ceiling. I asked “That won’t flake down and fall in my cup of coffee in ten years, will it?”
I never heard back from them again. 
5 years
Lol! No doubt.
For many things I agree about this, but there are a few problems if we just see it as a formula:
•if you need shoes today and all you have is $40, I would rather see the poor man buy the $40 shoes than go into debt for the $400 pair.
• I think cars are an outlier. I bought a 2005 van in 2010 for $5,800 cash. A new model at the same time would have been about $22,000 and we only had $13,000 available for a vehicle. We’ve put about $500 a year into it. We are still way under what the new one would have cost.
•My tastes change frequently. The brushed nickel I loved in 2008 now irritates me. I’m working on replacing them. The cheaper door knobs worked better for me.
Also to add for kids.
•Kids grow quickly. I’ve never bought them $40-50 sneakers when I knew that in 6-8 months I’d need to buy them more. I’ve always been fine with the $10-20 variety from the department store.
•My kids destroy clothing. They play hard. While I will spend $30 on a t-shirt for myself, I most definitely will not for them.
What is this thread about anyway?
Spending money. You are right on target 
.
Are you my wife??? 
No. But I’m just as right as she is.
A couple days ago, TWICE in 24 hours my there was something I had said to my wife that she didn’t believe me about that she then discovered I was right about. She then said, “I was wrong and you were right, again!” (To be fair, these were two very insignificant things in life, such as where I had just seen an attachment for our old vacuum cleaner but is now missing and she thought I was crazy for having seen it to begin with.)
Now, on one level, those words are music to my ears. But then I panicked. Because, I mean, truth is, my wife is right MOST OF THE TIME! And if she got things wrong twice in a day, does that mean she’s losing her “rightness”? And if that’s the case, how can I rely on my wife for begin right about things all the time?
I told my wife that she’d better go back to being right all the time. It is horribly disconcerting otherwise!
I LOL’d.
At church last summer a man was telling a story along these lines and my son DS16 piped up, “Happy wife; happy life.” I thought I was going to have to do CPR on some of the men in the group they were laughing so hard.
(I am just as likely to find my kids talking with people 20-60 years their senior at church as I am to find them chatting with friends.)
Be careful! There is a non-zero chance that she is a pod person.