I was talking to a friend the other day who recently made a large purchase.

“Look at how much I saved,” was the typical bragging line, pointing out that the item usually retailed for $1,500, but was purchased for less than $1,000.

“You didn’t save anything,” I noted. “Only if you had purchased nothing could you have saved money. No one saves money by spending money.”

This brought on a perplexed look from my friend, who seemed to miss my concept altogether. It’s really simple. If you want to save money, you don’t spend any. How can anyone call it ‘saving’ money when the purchase is a luxury item that isn’t needed to start with. I might allow the stretch to call paying less saving if the item were a necessity, even though it still is technically not true in my book.

Nonetheless, a big-screen television is not a necessity by any stretch of the imagination.

When I look at my spending, I try to justify all my expenditures either as necessities or luxuries. The batteries I purchased for the screw gun for $44 each? Necessities. The new rifle that I bought for less than its value? Luxury.

But think about it, since the batteries were $79 at the big hardware store, I got them for nearly half price, but I still didn’t save anything since I spent $88.

It has been said that a woman will buy something she doesn’t need just because it is half price, but a man will pay double for something he thinks he really needs. I hope I said that right.

I can surely say that I can see how that is very much true. The coupon-cutters in my family are likely to come home with things for which they have no immediate use just to ‘save’ a few bucks.

My mother is a case in point. I was in her laundry room the other day and noticed that she had about 10 boxes of washing powder. She and my father live alone.

Store X was doubling coupons and had a sale on besides, so they ended up buying a lifetime supply of laundry detergent. The whole family will be dead and gone before they run out of soap. In the drawers in the bathroom, one might find 10 different kinds of deodorant, five kinds of mouthwash and multiple kinds of toothpaste. At least they don’t have an eternity’s supply of dental floss, since both my parents wear dentures.

I’m not much on hoarding up 50 of something that I am only going to use once in awhile, but I will pick up ‘freebies.’ Freebies are things that I can find for free or nearly free that look like they might come in handy later. For instance, the collection of pallets I gathered up at the dump to keep my firewood off the ground, the railroad ties a friend gave me because they were no longer needed by him, the stack of buckets I picked up from a drywall finisher and the hundreds of feed sacks that I got from a local cattleman. There’s much more than that, just look behind my house.

Given that I have a penchant for taking free things I may or may not need, it stands to reason that I might be somewhat cheap. I am too cheap to ever pay double price for hardly anything — unless double price is still less than $10.

Shopping here in town is one of my priorities. In doing price checks on building materials, I recently found out that the local building supply company was actually cheaper than the bigger store in a neighboring town on drywall and some other materials. I hate to admit it, but I was actually surprised. I always shop here for the reasons of supporting my hometown and for convenience. Even so, it turned out that the prices weren’t as high as I might have thought. While it may pay to shop around, in this case, it paid to shop in Sparta.

I also have found that I can buy my coffee beans on Main Street for the same price as a supplier in a bigger city has been charging me, a move which prompted me to start buying those here as well. With the groceries already coming from our two stores here, I can say that easily more than half (maybe even three-fourths) of all the money I spend ends up in the hands of a merchant in Alleghany County. Besides, I like going into places where the people know me by name. You definitely don’t have to be famous to be recognized here.

In saying it another way, I started off shopping in my hometown to do the merchants a favor and found out that I was actually helping myself as often as not.

Get more tongue in cheek commentary this week's issue of the Alleghany News!

Email: allnews@ls.net