I guess it's all relative. When I was young and broke, but a lot more tolerant of doing without, I made what I had or could afford work. Now I am older, I've done my time, and I have some coin to blow. I still consider myself frugal, but if I see something I want, I am more inclined to buy it without scrutinizing whether or not it is essential, or if I could make do with something lower quality or slightly less functional.

It's like anything else I suppose. I could make a $700 POS vehicle work just fine for me, provided I don't rely on it too much. I can make a $5,000 vehicle do just as well, and maybe get a bit more complacent about checking on it regularly to make sure nothing is about to fall off or blow up. I will probably never own a brand new vehicle because getting one two or three years old that is mechanically sound seems more than I would ever need, regardless of how much money I have in my pocket.

I have a lot of dutch ovens that I haven't used in the past 3 years. In fact, I am hard pressed to think of a time when I ever had to use all of them at once for anything except when I taught camp cooking. Even when I worked as a camp cook I never needed more than maybe 6 with me. They are all good ovens that passed a fair amount of scrutiny at the time of purchase, even though most of them are from no-name manufacturers. A couple are from the best in the business, just because they are exactly what I was looking for at the time, or they were something special that caught my eye. There's still a few models I don't own that I wish I had, like the bigger Maca ones, but I just can't seem to justify spending $300 or more for a pot I will seldom use and is so heavy and bulky. However, if I came across one that was on sale or someone gave me one (yeah, that's not gonna happen), I would probably keep it and use it when I could.

I guess when it comes to survival gear, there's a time and place to be cheap, and then there's things that you will want to spare no expense on. Frugal isn't always about being a penny pincher, it is value for money. Like in another thread, it just doesn't make sense to me to own 100 lbs of bug out gear, regardless of how much or little it costs, but you can be sure that I will pay as much as I can afford to get the best in certain cases. A 99 cent bic lighter will get me by most of the time, a $7.00 refillable piezo electric/catalytic wind/waterproof butane lighter will always be my primary go to firestarting source, and I will never pay $50 or more for any kind of lighter, even though there's plenty of them out there.