Some may call me a minimalist; some may call me frugal.  At the core of it, I am a very cheap person.  BUT, and this is a big BUT, I always lecture my husband about making sure if he is going to spend our money on something, he better be sure it is going to last.  I am a big believer in buying once for quality so we don’t buy the same crappy thing 5 times over.  I would much rather he spend $600 on a table saw that will last forever than buy one for $150 that we will have to replace in 3 years.  I constantly harp on this whenever he wants to purchase something.

For whatever reason, maybe it was hormones, I decided to not listen to my own advice when my daughter was born.  With our first child, we had paid for an entire first-year package of professional photos that included newborn, 3 months, 6 months, 9 months and 12 months.  After the whole experience, I decided we could just do newborn, 6 months and 12 months for our next child (you know already starting that whole “second child gets less stuff” thing).

In true “intense Rachel budgeting” form, I decided we were not paying for a photographer this time because we could easily get pictures done at a department store for a fraction of the cost (and I had a coupon!).  What I didn’t think about was how you typically get what you pay for.

Flash forward to me 1 week postpartum, the week before Christmas, at a JC Penney photo studio packed wall-to-wall with families, breastfeeding in the hopes my daughter will be sleeping for her photos.  Got the visual?

Turns out the reason their photo sessions are not very expensive (and I had a coupon for a free sitting!  Couldn’t pass that up!) is that they are only 15 minutes long!!  This was a very important thing I forgot to check on.  If you have never had a photo session with a newborn, just know that 15 minutes is about enough time to get them in one position and get a good picture….Maybe.  Which is exactly what we got.

They took a family picture for us, as well as one of my son covering his face while my daughter is in a crate next to him screaming her head off.  The whole experience was terrible and a complete mismatch of the expectation I had in my head.  I’ll give you one guess what happened next……

Mom (that’s me) LOST. IT.  You know that same Penney’s with people packed wall-to-wall?  Ya, I started crying hysterically in the middle of it all. My poor husband, bless him for dealing with me.  I was crying, the baby was crying, my son was crying and I wouldn’t stop blabbering about how I just wanted pictures of her little hands because they were never going to be that size again.  I can’t even write this without laughing out loud right now.  It was ridiculous.

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Needless to say, we paid for a disc with the 11 pictures that were taken of my daughter crying for ~$150 and left (as quickly as my husband could get us out of there).  I was so upset by the whole process and embarrassed that I had decided to be cheap on photographs of my daughter.

My husband was understanding enough (and smart enough to not say “I told you so” to a hormonal wreck) to allow me to hire a photographer last minute to come to our home to take the pictures of her hands (still laughing out loud about this) that I so desperately wanted.  I ended up paying $125 for round two of newborn photos, but it was so worth it.

Lesson learned.  Had I just focused on quality in the first place, we would have spent about half of what we spent on me trying to be cheap.  There are just some things in life you should not try to be cheap on. I will never forget this. Silver lining – I now have a photographer I love (Monica Storey Photography).

To remind myself of this principle, I have a framed picture of my daughter’s precious little hands.

Have you experienced this before when you try to be cheap, but end up spending so much more?

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