Making purchasing decisions

• Hmm...should I group this with decisions that don't involve spending money, but involve spending time? It seems like those are kind of equivalent.

General ideas

• It seems the amount of time/money that you spend researching the decision should be proportional to the amount of time/money you will be spending based on the decision.

My purchasing decisions

• 2015.12 - I bet ~$800 that Trump would win the Republican nomination.

  • I spent a lot of time monitoring this bet after I made it. That extra time reduced the value of the bet. In hindsight it might be best to make the bet and then not monitor it so closely(?).

• 2016.02 - Interview Kickstart

  • I suspect this was not a great decision, but I'm not totally sure. I think the anxiousness / procrastination I felt was part of what motivated me to get my auto-remoteok program working, so it may have had an unintended benefit.

• 2016.09.13 - I bought a headset that had a microphone attached.

  • I had just started at Service Fusion and my new boss suggested I get a headset with an integrated microphone so that during our daily 'stand-up' on Skype I would be easier to understand. I was initially going to spend ~$90-$110 on a gaming headset as that was what one of my coworkers was using, but I then spent about an hour doing research and thinking about it, and I ultimately decided that for my purpose I only really needed a ~$20 call-center headset, as a gaming headset is really designed so that you can simultaneously 1) get very-high-quality audio and 2) communicate frequently 3) for many hours at a time. But I only need the microphone for short periods of time, and I already have a pair of expensive headphones (and so buying another pair would be something of a waste). I think this was a good use of time.

Checklist for making purchasing decisions

• Ask for previous customers that you can talk to?

Examples of purchasing decisions to learn from

• The van

• the CFA

• Interview Kickstart

  • I didn't really do a whole lot of due diligence

  • it turned out that the majority of the students already had programming jobs

  • the class was assuming a level of knowledge a little ahead of what I had.

Buying food

• How do you know whether it's worth extra to get a fancier kind of food?

  • Example: I can buy $14/lb salmon or I can buy sardines.

  • I'm assuming that the social aspect of the food is held constant; i.e. you aren't choosing between eating alone for less money or eating with others for more money.

  • I suspect the answer is based on the actual nutrients in the food.