Dropped $60 on a used bread machine at a garage sale in Plano, and the lady threw in her sourdough starter
I only went for a $10 lamp and ended up chatting with her for 40 minutes about why my loaves keep coming out dense, and that jar of starter has been feeding my family since March. What random buy turned into way more than you paid for?
The part about chatting for 40 minutes really gets me, because that free advice was probably worth more than the machine itself. A neighbor down the street gave me her old tiller when she moved, and she spent an hour showing me how to break up the clay soil in our yard. Cheap things from people who know what they're doing come with lessons you can't buy at a store. My tomatoes did better that summer than any year since and I still use her trick of mixing in coffee grounds.