I don't care how much money you think you are saving over time, chances are you are spending more time on something when you should be spending money on it. Time is more valuable than money, and if you have a set rate for what your time is worth, you can easily decide what to spend money on. There are also some slightly-illegal activities you should remove from your daily life if you are using them, and adopt a certain mindset about how thrifty or spendy you are about money.
The best thing you can do to avoid being a cheapskate is to figure out how much your time is worth. If you spend most of your time working at a day job for $20 per hour, your time is worth $20 per hour. If you freelance for $10 per hour, then your time is worth $10 per hour. If your time is worth $20 per hour and there is a $47 product out there that can save you 8 hours of time accomplishing some task, you are basically trading $47 to get $160 back. That's a no-brainer, right?
The next thing you can do is immediately stop pirating music, software, and videos if you are doing so. Most of these situations involve trading the money saved for time spent. Rent DVDs instead of watching TV. Buy an Apple TV, TiVo, or Netflix Roku and stream your TV shows and movies from iTunes or Amazon Unbox. It's true that there are ways to obtain TV shows for free, but usually they involve waiting around for long periods of time. Similarly, using pirated software is not worth the effort because many illegally shared programs are either buggy, or contain spyware which can cause you to lose your precious data.
It all comes down to having the right mindset about spending money. In most cases, you spend money to save time, and as long as you actually use the products you buy, you aren't throwing money out the window. Instead, you are reinvesting in your business and getting a powerful tax deduction.
Along those lines, you know that I make it a point to weed out the low ticket tirekicker customers by not giving away too much free information up front. I stay away from offering low ticket products without a big backend, or from offering free trials. Because that's not the kind of customer I want... I don't want cheapskates.
Robert Plank, internet marketer, PHP programmer, and 23 year old homeowner, made an average of $10,000 per month every month in 2008. Check out his marketing ideas worth STEALING at: http://www.robertplank.com
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