This might not be a hack, but it is useful information.
“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”
Along these lines, I asked reddit last week for ideas of things that you can buy which will cost more upfront, but would eventually pay for themselves. My stipulation for the post was that they had to make the money back within one year, didn't require much more time or skill, and would have to be backed up with a calculation. YMMV based on your habits and climate, but here's what made the cut:
The meta life-hack here is to make personal questions engaging and use the internet to source ideas.
Impressive, but electric mattresses probably consume more money than simlpy stacking on the blankets. Also, they do funny things to your thermoregulation.
— Wikipedia
This thread is for posting any promising or interesting ideas for lifehacks you've come up with or heard of. If you've implemented your idea, please share the results. You are also encouraged to post lifehack ideas you've tried out that have not been successful, and why you think they weren't. If you can, please give credit for ideas that you got from other people.
To any future posters of Lifehack Ideas threads, please remember to add the "lifehacks_thread" tag.