[bane]

The truth is, almost everybody ends up financing something and paying a lot more for it in the end than the sticker price. The trick is figuring out how to either avoid financing if possible, or minimizing the extra that you pay when you have to.

Even when you aren't explicitly financing something, people throw away huge sums of money all the time when there are cheaper alternatives. For example, how many of us pay rent for housing?

For non-optional things like shelter, this is harder to navigate. What makes people scratch their heads about a sofa is that strictly speaking, you can get by without a sofa. It's an optional purchase. It sucks not to have one, but there's no "sofa" in Maslow's Hierarchy of needs. My parents in law come from a culture where sitting furniture is a completely optional item for example (Korea) and most people sit and sleep on the floor perfectly fine.

I remember when I was first married, my wife and I were really desperately poor, for at least a year we didn't have any furniture at all. Even after we stopped being poor I don't think we bought a sofa for the first 4-5 years of our marriage and then it was a triple discount coupon holiday sale sofa. 10 years later we still have that sofa and have no plans to get rid of it any time soon.

Money's great, it can almost instantly eliminate all sorts of inconveniences, and easy access to more money than you can effectively manage is a real problem. Even relatively smart people, given absolutely free money (like lottery winners) don't know how to deal with it.