All insurance is a gamble – you pray that you are wasting the money you spend on it because having it pay for itself is catastrophic. After years of having good doctors leave HMO’s (at one point the HMO you cite was paying dr’s only $9 per patient per month no matter what the dr needed to do to care for the patient) I started to insist on the most comprehensive plan open to me.

Then I got cancer.

Instead of facing financial collapse as so many patient around me are, or making choices about what I can pay vs what care I need or tests would be helpful, I can just work on being well. Because I lost the insurance bet, and I needed it.

I replaced my router about a year ago. At the time I figured why spend all that extra money on fancy technology I can’t even put to use. Well, here it is a year later and unexpected circumstances have brought two computers into my house that could, if available, make use of the faster “n” technology. Instead they’re stuck on my “g” network.

Another example: insurance. My son needs an expensive “team” evaluation for a possible (read: probable) Asperger’s Syndrome diagnosis. I recently discovered that the only qualified organization in my entire state (not just my local area, the whole state.) is out-of-network. This diagnostic process will cost, at minimum, $3,300.

Our family is lucky to have insurance at all. If we’d been given the option of out-of-network providers for a paltry $7/mo I would have jumped at it without a second thought — even before finding out about our latest insurance predicament. I’ve had to change doctors for myself and my children because our preferred provider didn’t renew their contract with our insurance company. And I’ve had to pass over too many recommended doctors because they weren’t in network.

I’ve never been one to choose the top option just for the sake of having the biggest or the bestest. I’m not a bells-and-whistles-just-for-the-sake-of-bling kind of person. But I’ve learned too many times that buying the least expensive option is rarely a good idea if you’re buying a product you expect to own for an extended period of time.

But when I got to McD’s and was about to order, I remembered that in the past when we’ve ordered large milkshakes, we were never able to finish them and that extra $0.50 just ended up being wasted. So I got a medium and my sister was just able to finish it with a little help from me. Waste averted.

You can splurge on a bigger coffee once in a while, but buying the smallest can really save money, time, and aggravation when it comes to purchases like cars, electronics, computers and, software.

I think a big mistake people make is choosing more than they currently need because they “will grow into it”.

90% of the time, you will end up not using the extra capacity or features. Either you will never have the need or else the technology will leap frog so much that you have to replace the whole thing.

Instead, you will end up paying the support costs of having all this complexity around which you will never use.