Cheap and frugal are not the same thing, and most lists get the difference backwards.
Cheap is buying the store-brand version of something you were never going to use. Frugal is not walking down that aisle at all.
That sounds like a small distinction. It’s the whole thing. If a purchase was never going to pay you back, buying it at 40 percent off does not fix it. You still lose the money. You just lose less of it, more slowly, and you get to feel clever while it happens.
So this is not a list of ways to spend less. The things frugal people never buy are mostly entire categories, not expensive versions of things. They skip the aisle.
One more thing before we start. I am not clean on all of these. One of them I did myself, and the evidence is still somewhere in my apartment. I will get to it.
The things frugal people never buy
1. A brand-new car
In June 2026, the average price an American actually paid for a new vehicle was $49,758. In the first three months of the year, the average payment on a new car loan hit a record $770 a month.
Notice which of those two numbers people repeat. Almost nobody says “I bought a $49,000 car.” They say “it’s $770 a month.” The monthly number is the product being sold. The price is just how the dealer calculates it.
Frugal people do not shop for a cheaper new car. They buy something two or three years old and let the first owner take the drop.
There’s a book from the nineties called The Millionaire Next Door where the researchers found something they weren’t expecting: most of the actual millionaires they surveyed drove used cars. Not modest new cars. Used. There’s a story in it about two doctors on similar incomes. One spends about sixty hours grinding a dealer down and buys a new luxury car at close to cost. The other buys a three-year-old one in an afternoon and gets on with his life. The first guy got a fantastic deal. He still spent far more.
2. The extended warranty at checkout
Consumer Reports has been surveying this for years and the answer barely moves. Most people who buy these plans never file a single claim. On major appliances, the typical plan cost about $126, and when something did break, the repair ran only around $26 more than the plan itself.
So you’re paying to avoid a risk that was small, and the payment is roughly the size of the risk.
Here’s the test I’d use. If the thing broke tomorrow, could you cover the repair out of savings? If yes, you are not buying protection, you are buying peace of mind. Peace of mind is a real thing to want. It just isn’t insurance, and it’s usually cheaper to build it yourself with [an emergency fund].
3. Brand-name medicine when a generic exists
The FDA puts generics at roughly 80 to 85 percent below the brand price, for the same active ingredient, tested to work the same way in your body.
This one is on the list because it breaks the pattern, and I want to be honest about that. Usually I’m telling you the cheaper version is also a loss. Here it isn’t. Same drug, different box, different color pill. If your pharmacy hasn’t switched you over, ask them to.
4. Premium gas in a car that doesn’t ask for it
Open the manual. If it says regular, premium buys you nothing. “Recommended” and “required” are different words, and it’s worth knowing which one is printed in your car’s book.
Small item. But it runs every week for years, and that’s exactly the kind of leak that doesn’t feel like anything while it’s happening. If you’ve never mapped where your money goes, that’s worth an hour.
5. Lottery tickets
A Bankrate survey found the lowest-income households spent an average of $412 a year on tickets. The highest-income households spent about $105.
That gap is the whole story. The people who can least afford the loss are buying the most of it.
I don’t think people who buy tickets are foolish. When the distance between where you are and where you want to be is enormous, a two-dollar ticket is the only item on the shelf claiming it can close it in one move. That’s not stupidity. That’s doing math on a bad board. But it’s still $412, and $412 is the start of something real if it goes anywhere else.
6. The phone upgrade, on a plan
Watch how phones are sold now. Not $1,100. Thirty-one dollars a month. Twelve dollars more than what you’re already paying.
I know someone who financed a flagship phone he had no business buying, on a small and unsteady income, mostly to have it. Three things happened. Nobody complimented it. He never once mentioned what he was paying each month. And when the contract ran out, he did the whole thing again.
That last part is what gets me. He didn’t get the thing he bought it for, and it still didn’t change what he did next.
Morgan Housel has a good way of putting this. You see someone in an expensive car and you don’t think “that person is impressive.” You picture yourself in the car. The driver is invisible. So the money is being spent to buy admiration from an audience that is busy imagining itself.
7. A gadget bought to be seen
Here’s mine.
A few years ago I bought a smartwatch. Not the reasonable one. The one nobody around me had. I told myself it was for the health tracking and the step count and the sleep data, and every single one of those features was on a model costing a fraction as much. That was not the reason, and I knew it while I was paying.
I wore it for about a month.
I don’t know where it is now. That’s the honest answer. Not sold, not given away. It is somewhere in my apartment and I could not tell you where.
The money is gone and I don’t even have the object. That’s the part I think about when I’m about to buy something to be seen with.
8. Clothes for a life they don’t live yet
The blazer for the job you might apply for. The hiking boots for the trip that’s still theoretical. The dress for an event nobody has invited you to.
Nothing is wrong with any of those objects. But buying them is a way of buying a version of yourself, and the clothes always show up long before the life does.
The Millionaire Next Door has a detail I keep coming back to. About half the millionaires they surveyed had never in their lives paid more than a few hundred dollars for a suit. Not “they waited for sales.” They just never did it.
9. A storage unit for things they don’t use
You are paying rent, every month, on objects you have already decided not to live with. Give it two years and most units have cost more than the contents are worth.
And the cheap version, a smaller unit, is still a loss. That’s the test doing its job.
10. Buy now, pay later on things that get used up
Splitting a couch into four payments is one thing. Splitting a takeout order, a grocery run, or concert tickets into four payments is a different thing, because the item is gone before the payments are.
If it will be finished before you finish paying for it, that is information about your cash flow, not a payment option. [It usually points at something bigger.]
A fair warning about lists like this one
Right about here, an article like this normally starts to sound like a lecture. So let me stop and say the obvious thing.
Some of these choices are only available to people with a little cushion.
Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a book in the late nineties where she took low-wage jobs and tried to live on what they paid. The most useful thing in it isn’t the misery. It’s the arithmetic. Being broke, she found, comes with its own set of extra charges, and none of them are optional.
Can’t put down first month plus deposit? Then you rent by the week, which costs more per month than the apartment you couldn’t get into.
Living in a room with a hot plate? Then you can’t cook a big cheap pot of something and eat off it for four days. You eat whatever heats up at a convenience store, which costs more per meal.
No health coverage? You skip the prescription, and later you pay for what skipping it did. She describes a man who lost a roofing job because he couldn’t afford the antibiotic for a cut on his foot.
The detail that stuck with me hardest: she wants to make the classic frugal-advice lentil stew, and she can’t, because she doesn’t own a pot, a ladle, or potholders, and those run about thirty dollars she doesn’t have. Following frugal advice takes money up front.
So if some items on this list feel out of reach, that is not a character problem. Take what applies, skip what doesn’t, and if money is tight right now [start here instead].
Worth noticing, too: when she needs work pants, she doesn’t buy the cheapest pair in the store. She buys marked-down ones from a better line, because the cheap pair won’t survive being washed every night. Same principle as this whole article, running in the opposite direction.
Back to the list
11. Whatever is trending on the feed this week
The feed is not showing you products. It’s showing you people who look settled and calm and finished, and the product happens to be standing next to them. You are not buying the item. You’re buying the adjacent life.
12. A bigger place than the one they’re happy in
I know a retired teacher who owns a large house and doesn’t live in it. He lives in a smaller one. He still goes back to his old school to teach, unpaid, because he likes doing it.
He can afford the upgrade. He has simply never taken it.
This is the hardest kind of never-buying to notice, because there’s no receipt and no story. Nothing happened. That is exactly the point. And here’s the thing that surprised me when I thought about it: his income now is basically zero. The calm didn’t come from earning more.
13. The second one of something they already own
The second set of headphones. The backup coat. The kitchen gadget that does what a knife already does.
Not because owning two of something is a sin. Because most of us buy the second one to fix a dissatisfaction with the first one, and the dissatisfaction usually isn’t about the first one.
14. A membership bought as motivation
The gym in January. The course. The app with the annual plan that was cheaper per month.
Buying the equipment is not the same as doing the thing, and somewhere underneath we know it, which is why the purchase itself feels like progress. It’s the cheapest available down payment on becoming a different person. It doesn’t work, because what was missing was never the equipment.
If you’ve got a stack of these running quietly on your card right now, [they’re worth an audit].
15. A way out of a bad mood
This one costs the most over a lifetime and never appears on lists like this.
Bad day, so, something small. And it works. That’s the honest part, it genuinely does work, for about twenty minutes. It just doesn’t work for long, and the dose gets more expensive every time.
Nothing on this list is harder to break.
Now the other direction, because this cuts both ways
Everything above says don’t buy. So I want to end somewhere else, because there is a way to fall off the other side of this, and it’s worse.
There’s a man I’ve heard about who has land, a paid-off house, a car, and money coming in from three directions. By any measure he is not poor. He wears clothes he has had stitched back together, and when the elastic goes he ties them with a piece of rope. His whole family eats badly, not occasionally but as a way of life. Not because there’s no money. Because spending it feels wrong to him.
That is not frugality. That’s the same illness as overspending, pointed the other way, and it is costing him something he cannot buy back later.
Ramit Sethi has a line I keep: cut hard on the things you don’t care about, so you can spend freely on the ones you do. The point of skipping the $49,000 car is not to have less. It’s to have the money free for whatever you wanted it for.
Which raises the question that probably should have opened this article.
What are you earning it for?
If the honest answer is “so nothing bad happens,” then the list above is your list and it’ll do real work. But if you cannot name one thing you spend on freely and without guilt, the problem was never your spending, and no amount of never-buying is going to fix it.
Where to start
You don’t need to adopt all fifteen. Pick the one that made you slightly uncomfortable while you were reading. That’s almost always the one.
And if you’d rather see where the money is going before deciding what to cut, the Money Leak Quiz takes about two minutes.
