I agree that easy money is a problem. Look at 2008 and all the mess that caused…
I have mentioned the experience my GF had when buying a new car. She want to the local Kia dealer and you could tell they were doing all this bait and switch stuff. She wanted a basic model without touch screens and that crap. They had two strippers on the lot with a 6 speed manual and as little automated stuff as you could hope for in a modern car. The 6 speed was a lot of fun and I thought it was a pretty solid car. “Well, for only $15 more a month you can have an infotainment system, enhanced climate control, etc.” They just wanted to keep adding on ANYTHING. “For an extra $1/month you can have heated floormats.” That is a joke but you get what I am saying. “6 months no payments”. The list just went on and on and everything was about the financing and not the out the door price of the car. This really rubbed me the wrong way.
I see this kind of thing in the electronics industry all the time. I tend to tell people to avoid the cheap no-name brands as well as the cheapest models of otherwise reputable brands because something is always missing. Being a rural area, you are somewhat limited in what you can get if you need something ASAP. If you can wait two days or so, you can get ANYTHING Amazon sells but choices for immediate needs are limited. Luckily we have a Staples in town so you aren’t stuck with Wal-Mart low end stuff.
Well, I was at a small town quite far away. I was working and realized we needed a new monitor. The only place in town was Wal-Mart so we went. They only had 3 monitors in the store. Two were no names and total crap. The most expensive one was a decent looking 24 inch HP. I have setup dozens or hundreds of the 24 inch model sold at Staples and this looked like the same monitor except it was $10 cheaper and had a different model number on the sticker. I am pretty sure that is the only difference in the monitor itself. The model sold at Staples always come with an HDMI cable and I assumed this one would as well.
Anyway, we get home and realize the monitor doesn’t have a cable so the lady has to run back out and buy one. They actually charge more for the two items separately at Wal-Mart than at Staples so this is another form of bait at switch where the cheaper price isn’t really cheaper. At least she got a decent monitor out of the deal and I guess this would be the better option if you had an extra cable around or were replacing a monitor with the same type of cable already.
One thing I see poor people do is buy something cheap as long as it looks good when it is new. Lots of times the veneer of any quality is only skin deep and they are buying cheap stuff far sooner than they should. It is still a “good deal” to them because they don’t understand this.
I was talking to the owner of a reputable used car dealer in town once while working on his stuff. He said you get pretty good people with good credit buying cars for more than $10,000. Anything less can be hit or miss. He says you get really good people and some really bad people. Then he mentioned how he sometimes has some older model beaters around tax time and such. I thought it was funny how he said he would always put the best synthetic oil money could buy in these cars because odds were the person buying a $1200 car would never change the oil again. He had a few do this and come back 3 months later when the engine died and they were all mad. He says that way the car should run at least a year before the engine fails catastrophically. I asked him “So you just put regular conventional oil in the more expensive cars because you know the owner will likely change it but put the good stuff in the cheap cars?” He was like “Yep!” You don’t save money by buying the cheap stuff or deferring maintenance.