If It’s Free, It Can Cost You

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay 

It’s natural to be attracted to freebies. Why not? You don’t have to pay anything for them and you get the benefit. But free stuff can actually be more expensive than its real worth. Take WhatsApp for example. I am not a user of WhatsApp, so I frequently get surprising looks from those whose lives now revolve around this messaging tool. WhatsApp is free, so everyone is on it. It does provide ease of communication and file/photo sharing but in return, it compromises your privacy. Around the world, internet giants like Facebook and Google are being investigated on privacy concerns. Apart from privacy, WhatsApp clutters your phone. With its barrage of forwarded messages (nobody is sure where they originate) and videos, it makes your life hell. You just can’t declutter your phone, so you end up buying ones with larger memory. To store what? Junk! When emails were introduced, they were intentionally kept free, so that more and more people should opt for them. Thanks to a lot of spam and unwanted mails, today most inboxes are congested. It’s a nightmare thinking of cleaning them up. If you do undertake the task, you are actually incurring cost in terms of the time spent to do this unproductive task. Not to forget the irritation such a task will cause. Today many businesses are being configured around this idea of giving something free and then extracting a much bigger cost later. Gaming is another example. Once children start playing a game, they are lured into buying stuff within the game. In banking and finance, toxic products are sold for free, for instance, credit cards. The banking rep will tell you that the credit card has no fee. If you are caught in his trap, the bank will extract a lot more in terms of interest and penalties. The broker will waive off brokerage for the first year, only to pester you into making investment mistakes, which will cost you dearly. In a recent election, a political party won riding on giving electricity, water, bus travel and internet for free. Gullible voters were tricked into believing that the free stuff is permanent. The real cost will be visible with time. Free stuff also often lacks quality and is not sustainable. Avoid it like plague. If something is good, it’s also worth paying for. If something is given away for free, investigate where the actual cost lies. It will often be much greater than the actual worth of the freebie. Indeed, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.