I've gotten a lot of nice free stuff that hasn't caused any later harm in our budget. Mostly, it turns out a trial product is good, but not much better than what I've been using. I don't have a strong urge to actually spend money to get more of it. For example, free bath stuff from Calgon. It's nice, but when it's time to actually buy something, usually I go back to Pathmark's store brand of bubble bath and I'm perfectly happy.

But the whole purpose of a lot of freebies is to hook you on a product and get you to buy it in the future. What if you see there *is* a big difference over what you've been using and you get spoiled? For me right now, it's Schick Quattro for Women razor blades. For probably 20 years I've survived using plain old disposable Bic shavers, and not even the sensitive skin or ladies' kind. They come out to roughly 12 cents or so a piece, on sale. The best price I can find for the Quattros even on Ebay is around $1 a piece, often over a dollar, $1.25 or $1.50. Which means each cartridge is 100 TIMES the cost of my old shavers. The best price I could find in a store was at Walgreen's, on sale, with a coupon and a rebate, and it still came out to over $1.50 a piece.

I hate to admit how much time I've spent on Ebay trying to win some at the low end of the prices I've seen in the completed listings. I'm in a quandary about whether to continue looking there, just buy them outright at the best price I can find, or give them up. Are they that much better that I should keep on using them? Are they 100x better? If I do decide to keep using them, should I spend $60 to buy them in quantity on Ebay, or just try to fit a full-price package in my monthly budget? I'm getting darned tired of thinking about it.

When I think of spending $60 it just sounds ridiculous--I'm used to spending $12 for a year's worth of Bics, for both my husband and me. Now I'm thinking of spending $30+ a year on just me, when we are thousands of dollars in debt.

If I just could find them wholesale, it might be profitable to sell them on Ebay myself--at least profitable enough to pay for my own supply!

Can't say yet what I'll do because right now I seem to be in the midst of a PMS attack. It always makes me impatient, which I'm realizing has consequences as far as spending. (Will discuss more in another post.)