Things I Refuse to Buy Used — and Things I Will Only Buy Used

For most of my twenties I bought everything I could used. Furniture from Craigslist. Clothes from thrift stores. Books from Half Price Books. A car from a private seller. The frugality blogs I was reading at the time treated "buy used" as a kind of universal moral position — if you're not buying secondhand, you're being wasteful, financially irresponsible, or both.

I now think this position is half-right and half-wrong. There are some categories where buying used is genuinely one of the best financial moves you can make. There are other categories where buying used has cost me more, in money and frustration, than buying new would have.

After eight years of mostly-used purchasing, I have developed strong opinions about which is which. I want to walk through both lists, because I think this kind of category-by-category thinking is more useful than the generic advice to "buy used when possible."

Things I Will Only Buy Used

Let me start with the categories where used is, in my opinion, almost always the right move.

Cars. A new car loses approximately 20% of its value the moment you drive it off the lot. By year three it has lost 40-50% of its original value. The buyer who picks up that same car at year three is getting essentially the same vehicle, with most of the depreciation already absorbed by someone else.

I bought my current car — a 2017 Honda Civic — used in 2021 for $14,200. The same model new would have cost over $22,000. Four years and 67,000 miles later, the car still works perfectly, has needed only routine maintenance, and is currently worth about $11,000. The depreciation I've personally taken: $3,200. The depreciation the original owner took before I bought it: roughly $7,800.

The math on used cars is so favorable that I would have to be talked into ever buying a new one. The exception might be if you're going to keep a car for fifteen to twenty years, in which case the higher upfront cost of new amortizes acceptably.

Books. I cannot think of a financial reason to buy new books except for the author's benefit. Used books are typically 50-90% cheaper, the content is identical, and the supply is abundant. I buy almost everything from Better World Books, ThriftBooks, or my local secondhand bookstore. The annual savings, given how much I read, is several hundred dollars.

Furniture (most of it). A used solid-wood dresser from Facebook Marketplace at $80 is structurally indistinguishable from the same dresser at IKEA for $400. A used couch from someone in your neighborhood is often the same couch you would have bought new, just with a few years of someone else's life on it.

The catch with furniture is condition assessment. Mid-century modern wood furniture from the 1960s-70s is usually built better than anything you can buy at a furniture store today. Particle-board furniture from the 2000s is usually falling apart. Knowing the difference matters.

Sports equipment. Tennis rackets, golf clubs, ski equipment, bike accessories — almost all of these are bought by people who use them twice and then sell them. The secondhand market for sports gear is full of essentially-new items at 30-50% of retail. I bought a perfectly good set of used skis and boots for $180 that would have cost $600 new.

Tools. Quality tools are designed to last for decades. A used tool from someone's estate sale or a Craigslist ad is usually just as functional as the same tool new, often better because it's pre-broken-in.

Things I Refuse to Buy Used

Now the categories where I have learned, sometimes painfully, that the used version is not worth the savings.

Mattresses. I made this mistake once, in 2017. A friend was moving and selling her mattress for $80. It had been hers for two years. The fabric was clean. It looked fine.

What I did not appreciate at the time is that mattresses develop body impressions over time that conform to the previous owner's specific weight and sleeping position. They also pick up dust mites, skin cells, and (in my mattress's case, I later learned) bedbug eggs that hadn't yet hatched.

I spent six weeks dealing with a bedbug problem that cost me about $900 in pest control treatment, professional cleaning, and the cost of replacing the mattress and bedding I should have bought in the first place. The total cost of "saving" $400 on the mattress purchase was approximately $1,300.

I will never buy a used mattress again. Not from a friend, not from a thrift store, not at a garage sale. The savings are not worth the risk.

Underwear and swimwear. I shouldn't have to explain this one but I have seen it on frugal-living forums often enough that I'll mention it. Some categories of clothing are not appropriate for the secondhand market, regardless of how clean the seller insists they are.

Helmets and car seats. Both of these are designed to protect people in the event of an accident, and both lose their structural integrity after they've been involved in any kind of impact — even one that didn't visibly damage them. A used bicycle helmet from a stranger has an unknown history. A used car seat may have been in an accident the seller didn't mention.

For products where failure means injury, the savings are not worth the uncertainty about the product's history. Buy these new.

Running shoes. Running shoes break down structurally over the first 200-400 miles of use. The cushioning compresses. The arch support degrades. A pair of used running shoes might look fine externally while being structurally exhausted internally, which leads to injury for the next runner.

If you run regularly, buy your running shoes new. Casual sneakers for walking around are fine used.

Laptops and phones (with caveats). This category is more nuanced. A refurbished laptop or phone from a reputable seller — Apple's certified refurbished store, Backmarket, Decluttr — is often genuinely fine and a real saving. A used laptop from a stranger on Facebook Marketplace is risky because you have no way to verify the battery life, the storage health, or whether it's been dropped.

I will buy refurbished from a major reseller. I will not buy a private-party used laptop unless I know the seller well.

Anything where the per-use cost is small. This is the more general principle. If you use something every day for years, the difference between buying new for $200 and buying used for $80 amortizes to pennies per use. The annoyance of dealing with whatever the previous owner damaged is rarely worth the savings on a per-use basis.

Things in this category for me include: kitchen knives, cookware, my work bag, my office chair, my mattress (covered above), my wallet, the basic clothes I wear constantly. Buy these new, buy them once, and let them last a decade.

The Hidden Cost of Buying Used

I want to address something the buy-used advocates rarely mention, which is that secondhand purchasing has real time and emotional costs that have to factor into the math.

The Facebook Marketplace transaction takes time. You message the seller. You arrange the meetup. You drive to their location. You inspect the item. You haggle. You haul it home. The whole process can take two to three hours.

If your time is worth $30/hour, a $200 secondhand chair that took 3 hours to acquire effectively cost you $290. The new equivalent at $300 would have taken 20 minutes of online ordering and free delivery, for an effective cost of $310. The actual savings, after time, is $20 — not the $100 the sticker prices would suggest.

This is not an argument against buying used. It's an argument for being honest about the full cost. Some categories — cars, where the savings are thousands of dollars — easily absorb the time cost. Other categories — a $30 secondhand pair of jeans that took 90 minutes to find and buy — are essentially break-even when you account for time.

How I Actually Decide

The rough framework I use, with a category I'm considering buying used:

One: Are the failure modes acceptable? If used breaks or fails, will I be inconvenienced or will I be in danger? For helmets and car seats, the failure mode is unacceptable. For furniture, it's just inconvenient.

Two: What's the total time cost of acquiring this used? If it's two hours, that has to be added to the price. If the time-adjusted savings is less than 30%, used probably isn't worth it.

Three: Will the item still be functional? Some things degrade with use in ways the next owner can't easily detect. Mattresses, running shoes, batteries. Other things are essentially unchanged regardless of how much they've been used. Furniture, books, tools.

Four: What's the inventory turnover in the secondhand market for this category? Some categories have abundant supply and many sellers, which gives you negotiating leverage and the ability to walk away from a bad deal. Other categories are thin, where you might have to take whatever's available.

If a used item passes these four screens, I'll buy used. If it fails one or more, I'll go new. The decision is faster after you've done it a few times.

What I'd Tell You

The blanket advice to "always buy used" oversimplifies. So does the implicit cultural pressure to "buy new because used is gross." Both positions are too simple to actually guide good decisions.

The right framing is category-specific. For some categories, used is dramatically better and you'd be silly to buy new. For others, used is structurally inferior and the savings aren't worth the risk or the hassle.

After eight years of trying both, the categories I consistently buy used are: cars, books, furniture, sports equipment, tools. The categories I consistently buy new are: mattresses, helmets, running shoes, anything safety-critical, anything used daily for years.

The sorting takes a little thought up front. Once you've sorted, the decisions get easy. And you stop spending mental energy on the question of whether you're being responsible enough about it, because you've already worked out where the line is.

The frugality is in the framework, not in any single purchase.