I like buying high-quality things. And for the longest time, I’ve had this sneaking suspicion that buying high-quality stuff, which perhaps initially was more expensive, actually saved me money in the long run. It wasn’t until very recently, though, that I noticed a strong argument in support of my hunch.

The other day, I was researching this idea, trying to understand why I choose to buy nice things, and I came across a quote from Terry Pratchett in “Men At Arms,” part of the Discworld series. In the book, Sam Vimes, a police officer from the fictional city-state of Ankh-Morpork, gives us a very compelling financial reason for buying higher-quality, rather than cheaper, things:

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned $38 a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost $50. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of O.K. for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about $10. 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 $50 had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in 10 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.

Now this, I thought, was awesome. Paradoxically, you can actually spend less by spending more. I also realized that I’ve had many experiences with this phenomenon before.

Seventeen years ago, my wife and I had been married for three years, and we were living like poor college students. She was working as a ski instructor, and I was going to school full time. We had just had our first child. We didn’t have a lot of extra money, but we loved to ski, and we needed new ski pants.