I try to avoid spending money if I can. However today I couldn’t find a solution to a problem and needed to buy a tool to fix it.
First I spent a half hour looking around to see if I could adapt anything I had to work as a tool in the situation. I could not. The tool kit that I needed cost $8 and I ordered it and it will arrive in a few hours. Then I will either fix the problem or I won’t, but it will be another step towards finding a solution.
Every 10 years or so I need tools that I don’t have. I tend to have very few tools since I rarely need them. Renting them doesn’t make economic sense, but buying them hardly makes sense either. I’ll give you an example. I bought a multitool and spent about $100 on it. It is a fine tool but I never needed it at home, and I sometimes used it at work. However, then I used it less and less at work and it was rare when I did use it. Eventually, I hadn’t used it for years so I brought it back home. Then it sat ignored in my emergency bag for a decade and then I gave it to a friend who was able to use it.
I don’t have a good ROI when buying tools. I mostly just use them once and then never use them again. Another example. When I owned a house I had to buy many tools to fix things around the house. I used many of these things only once. It might have been cheaper to just call a handyman rather than buy all that stuff. I gave that toolbox to a friend when I moved to an apartment since home ownership isn’t what it is cracked up to be.
Another example goes back even further. I had a computer repairing business and bought tools as I needed them to fix computers. I spent a great deal of money on tools, and then I got a job offer and moved to Chicago. I didn’t bring my tools because they were heavy and only brought what I could carry. I didn’t use those tools at all, and I gave the tools that I had bought to relatives. What happens is that in my life it appears I end up buying tools for others to use since I only need them once.
Now you could argue that if I had kept my first set of tools I wouldn’t have had to buy these other tools. This is a challenge when you move states frequently to keep ahead of the law like me. It was also a challenge because the specific tools that I bought were different in each instance. Keeping them wouldn’t have helped me. I am not complaining it’s just that instead of individuals buying tools, we need to have tools available to check like from a tool library. Then we wouldn’t be wasting money on things we don’t need. Community ownership I believe is the future and makes economic and environmental sense.
I hope these are the last tools I need to buy. No doubt I will be giving these away in a decade as well.