A bicycle. No gas to pay, no parking fees, no insurance, and I can do most of the maintenance.

• Epson Ecotank Printer

Has ink tanks so money isn’t wasted on cartridges and the printer is actually initially expensive unlike those printers that make money back on ink catriges

• Hammer Drill with the proper bits

Makes it easier to mount shit to bricks, goes in brick like butter if you’re using the right drill and bits

I recomend Ryobi Hammer Drill & Bits

• Air Fryer

I’ve stopped using my oven and only use it rarely for things that I don’t want blown apart thst I can weigh down with a fork or spoon like Pizza for example

• Refillable Japanese brand pens and mechanical pencil

I recently got these to aid in Japanese study and refillable pens are more economical in the long run

And Japanese brands go hard on the quality of stationary and I got introduced into the cult of stationary obsession with this

I’ll edit my comment if I can think of anything else

I’m going to say my $50 charcoal grill. I’ve had more propane grills fail on me in 5 years, and charcoal grill keeps going. I know its terrible for the environment.

Camping hammock, it’s what I sleep in most nights. My body complains when I have to use a mattress

House insulation.

I live in Australia where the minimum insulation required by law is a long way below inadequate, and many cheap contractors go below the minimum because it’s so hard to prosecute them.

I already had solar and a house battery, so the next obvious step was replacing the insulation. With my already very low electricity bills I cant say that it literally paid for itself (although it would have without the solar and battery), but it has made the house so much more comfortable. On some summer days, the AC would be using 7kW and barely keeping the inside temperature down to 30°C/85°F. Now it uses 3-5kW and the whole house stays comfortable.

Also, finding and patching the massive gaps from the previous “landlord special” house extension made a huge difference to the temperature of that room, and explained how lizards had managed to get inside.

My Casio A 168 - I like watches and typically I would opt for more expensive ones but I still marvel at the amount of watch you get for this kind of money. The design is great, very comfortable to wear, very precise and has a very good battery lifetime and background light.

Someone else already mentioned a safety Razor.

My iron pan - much healthier, more ecological and will last longer than I will ever live.

Obviously my bike. Saved so much money on it. Although I still need to figure out what I should do with my very rusty chain. Should I replace it?

50ft electric plumbing snake. Cost $60 and saved me $200+ bill first time I used it. I’ve used it for friends and family as well, making its value well over 10x in savings, not just my own.

Two pairs of black Carhartt cotton duck overalls I bought in 2010 and 2011. One knee is blown out but they are the softest most comfortable clothes I own. I still wear them once or twice a week, wash on hot, dry on hot. These, a Dickies pocket T shirt, and 15 year old 14 eye steel toe Docs are the ‘uniform of the day’. Other than a few nice suits and some shorts, I’m pretty much not interested in clothing. The suits were bought for corporate recognition and I work from home otherwise.

I bought a big pack of eneloop rechargeable batteries a decade ago and they are just within the last year or so starting to fail.

Put 11.6 KW of solar on the roof. I’ll hit break even next year. Should have 15-20 years left of use.

Used Wacom Cintiq 21UX I got off FB marketplace for like $300 (MSRP went for $1500+) about 5 years ago. No new drivers are being updated or released for it because it’s so old, but it still works great. I’ve likely made back what I paid for it in art commissions since then.

First thing that comes to m8nd is my Pitbull head shaver. I s(h)aved several hundred euros on simple head shaves, 2 minutes a time.

I guess my bike? Have saved loads of money on bus tickets and it’s much more reliable too.

Sewing machine pays for itself quite quickly as paying a tailor to repair your clothes is like 1/3 the cost of a brand new sewing machine, so just repair like 3 items of clothing to get your money back.

I got a hot air rework station with a soldering iron many years ago.

The things I’ve repaired with it are so numerous, I cannot even recount them all, but here are a few:

• an assortment of gaming controllers
• a ghetto blaster from the 1970’s
• a few gaming consoles (Xbox 360, PS3 “Fat Lady”)
• retro technology (at least two 3Dfx Voodoo’s and a rare Abit motherboard)
• a full-metal eBook Reader (Sony PRS-505) that will probably survive an atomic fallout
• a Panasonic broadcasting camera from the 1990’s (because it looked cool and I wanted it to work)
• a few LCD monitors

Even though some of that work was just replacing old capacitors, I have saved so much money by buying “broken” stuff and fixing it up. No regrets. Over the years, I paired the station with a hotplate and a solder sucker and now I could probably open up an electronics repair shop. But I mostly do these repairs for fun. Fixing things calms my mind and soothes my soul.

• A pinecil. It was like $30, and has paid for itself within the first two things I did with it (repaired a good computer mouse which just had a USB connector lift from the board, and fashioned a DIY solar connector). I have repaired/made countless other small things in the few years I’ve owned it.
• Our bicycles, I guess? Financially speaking, they were dirt cheap (~$80 for both), we’ve sold our Prius since we bought them ($5000), we’re not paying for gas for trips within the city (~$30/mo), we’re not paying insurance or parking or maintenance or any of that crap (~$20-30/mo or so). So they have paid off within the first couple of weeks. And there’s so much more: both of us lost some weight, city errands are sometimes faster, and usually more pleasant now (no being stuck in traffic ever), and we’re not wasting space on a useless hunk of metal or polluting the air we breathe.