Deputy Headmistress has this post at Frugal Hacks: Keep what’s in your hand.

The article is a very blunt lesson as to how “saving money” may not be in your best interest if it involves spending money. A snippet:

… You’re the one paying out the money, you’re spending. You may be spending less than you would have if you hadn’t found the item on sale. You may be able to afford to spend that money, in which case, there is nothing wrong with spending it. Retail organizations and purveyors of junk have to pay their employees and eat just like the rest of us. But don’t confuse spending with saving. …

Here’s where I am coming from. We have been so poor we had no food in the house and no money coming in to buy more food for another 24 hours. We had two eggs between us and the next 24 hours, and I dropped one and broke it.

We have been so poor we could not afford to get our power turned on and we lived out of an ice chest and went to bed and rose with the sun.

We have been so poor we couldn’t run the heat in our bedroom, and glasses of water literally froze at night.

When I was pregnant with my first child I owned two pairs of maternity pants and maybe four shirts. My mother bought them for me. For the entire pregnancy I alternated between those two pairs of pants. I was so sick of those clothes by the time she was born I could hardly stand it.

Granted, that was all a very long time ago, and I spend money I do not need to spend all the time now- but I still just don’t relate to saving money by spending three times as much as I would have otherwise because it’s on sale.