10 times you can't afford to skimp

Internet access. In most areas, the price for high-speed Internet access has dropped significantly as competition between cable and DSL providers heats up. In some cities, you can get basic broadband for less than $20 a month. Sure, dial-up is cheaper still -- you can get it for $10 or less -- but your time has a value, too, and you're going to face increasingly lengthy waits as Web sites cater to the fast-access crowd.

If there's still a huge gap in your area between the price of dial-up and broadband, you may decide to wait, for thriftiness' sake, until it shrinks. But otherwise, investigate your options and upgrade now. Most people who have broadband wouldn't go back.

Home inspections. It's rather stunning that people will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a house but refuse to cough up $400 or so on an inspector who could warn them that they're throwing their money away.

Talk to any group of smart real-estate investors and you'll hear hair-curling stories of properties they fell in love with, only to have inspectors discover the house was about to fall down or needed tens of thousands of dollars in repairs. Having this knowledge helped them pass on bad deals or at least negotiate lower prices.

During the real-estate boom, there were some buyers who made the (weak) argument that insisting on an inspection would cause the sellers to choose another bidder, but in today's slower markets, there's really no excuse not to hire an expert to inspect a home before you buy. Check the American Society of Home Inspectors for details.

A good night's sleep: Priceless

Mattresses. You don't have to drop a couple of thousand dollars on a specialty mattress to get a good night's sleep, but you should steer clear of used mattresses (who knows how much life they've got left?) and really cheap ones.

Consumer Reports says that any name-brand queen size mattress with a list price of $800 or more should provide you a decade's worth of service. But you don't have to shell out that much for a good mattress -- the list price in a mattress store is about as meaningful as the sticker price on a car. If you're patient and wait for a sale, or are a good negotiator, you should be able to get that mattress for 30% to 50% less.

And when it comes to comfort, expensive isn't necessarily better. Some of Consumer Reports' testers hated the priciest mattresses. What matters is what feels good to you, so lie on the bed for at least 15 minutes before making up your mind.

Teenagers' cars. A vehicle is not a birthright, as I wrote in "Should you buy your kid a car?" But if you're going to buy your kid wheels, or allow her to buy her own, the car should have good safety ratings from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. (Most auto sites, including MSN Autos, include safety ratings from both organizations.)

Safety may be even more important in your kid's car than in the family vehicle. Why? Because teen drivers are, on average, pretty terrible. Their crash and fatality rate is much higher than any other age group, overall and per mile driven. So they're more likely to need airbags, restraint systems, roll bars and crumple zones than their doddering old parents.

The exterior doesn't need to look like much. After a few fender benders, it won't look like much anyway. But the interior should do its best to keep your progeny alive.

When your ethics are at stake. A recent poster to the Your Money message board suggested a money-saving strategy: taking paper towels from a workplace bathroom for home use. Other posters promptly called that "frugality" for what it is: stealing. If your efforts to trim your spending wander into the unethical (or the stingy -- meaning someone else is paying for your frugality), then your scrimping has gone too far.

Liz Pulliam Weston's new book, "Easy Money: How to Simplify Your Finances and Get What You Want Out of Life," is now available. Columns by Weston, the Web's most-read personal-finance writer and winner of the 2007 Clarion Award for online journalism, appear every Monday and Thursday, exclusively on MSN Money. She also answers reader questions on the Your Money message board.

Updated March 21, 2008

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