This post over at The Weight of Money struck a chord with me, especially this line:

The decision to not drive my accident-damaged car is mostly based on vanity issues. I don't want to drive a car that is smashed in on one side, no matter how much I love the car or how much I dislike driving our other two vehicles.

My wife and I tend to have disagreements over issues like this. She cares much more about aesthetics than I do. She's as much about form as function-I couldn't care less about form as long as it functions.

A few years back a member of my wife's family (who was having money problems) backed her car into ours and put a relatively small dent in the front end, as well as shattering a bit of the headlight covering. She offered to pay for it, but we didn't want to take her money given that we knew she didn't have much. The dent wasn't big enough to consider using insurance, since we knew that would bump up our premium in short order. So the question became: should we fix it?

My wife wanted to; I didn't. Our car still functioned fine, it was no longer a new car, and I didn't think it was particularly unsightly. Plus, body work costs a ton.

In the end we didn't fix it, but my wife was consistently embarrassed about ever being seen in the car (it basically became my car only once we traded in our other car and got a new one). I really didn't care if it looked a little ugly, and I didn't care who saw it or what they thought of me when they saw it. The money I saved by not doing the repair was worth the snobby looks of others who may have seen me as trash :)

Over the years I've come a bit more to my wife's way of thinking, and I am a little more likely to fix things to make them look better, even if the fix does nothing to improve the functionality.

But deep down I'm still a cheapskate.