Repair, replace or do without is a three-way comparison

The third option is the one that gets left out

Something stops working and the question forms immediately: repair or replace. The framing feels complete, and it has already smuggled in an assumption — that the household will continue to own one of these. For a fridge that is obviously true. For a large proportion of the things that break in a home, it is not obvious at all, and nobody checks.

The test is simple and slightly uncomfortable. How long has the thing been broken, and what has actually gone wrong in that time? An item that broke five weeks ago and has not been missed is telling you something that no comparison of repair quotes will reveal. Absence is the cheapest possible trial period.

This is not an argument for austerity. It is an argument for making the third comparison explicitly, because a decision framed as two options will be resolved as two options, and the resolution will feel thorough.

Repair costs are compared against the wrong number

The usual rule people reach for is a proportion: repair if it costs less than some fraction of a new one. That comparison uses the price of a replacement, which is the wrong figure, because a repaired item and a new item do not have the same remaining life. What is being bought in each case is years of service, and the two purchases buy different amounts of it.

Put it in those terms and the sum changes. Suppose a repair costs 90 and gives three more years, while a replacement costs 400 and gives eight. That is 30 a year against 50 a year, so the repair wins on this illustration, even though it is only a fifth of the replacement price and would have passed the proportional rule anyway. Now suppose the repair gives one year. It is 90 a year, and it loses badly.

The variable doing the work is the remaining life after repair, and that is exactly the number nobody can tell you reliably. A repairer can often say whether the rest of the machine looks tired, which is worth asking about directly, because it is the input the whole comparison turns on.

A new one is not the same product as the old one

Replacement introduces two changes at once that are worth separating. Efficiency and features may genuinely have moved on, which is a real benefit that a repair does not deliver. Build quality may equally have moved in the other direction, and in some categories the older item was made to last longer than anything currently sold at the same relative price.

Both claims get overstated. The efficiency argument is real but usually smaller than the marketing suggests, and it is worth calculating rather than assuming, since a saving in running cost has to be large to repay a purchase price. The nostalgic claim that things used to be built better is sometimes true and sometimes a survivorship effect: the badly made items from thirty years ago are not around to be observed.

Where there is a genuine change in what the category can do, replacement is buying something different rather than the same thing again, and it should be judged as a new purchase would be.

Time, hassle and risk belong in the sum

A repair costs an amount of money and also an amount of arranging: finding someone, waiting, being at home, possibly finding it did not hold. A replacement costs money and a different kind of arranging: choosing, ordering, disposal of the old one, and learning how the new one works. These are not equal, and which one is heavier depends on the household.

There is also risk, which is easy to underprice. A repair on an old machine carries a real chance that something else fails shortly afterwards, and the money spent on the first fix does not transfer to the second decision. That is a genuine cost of the repair route, distinct from the quoted price.

Neither route is universally the more sensible. Someone with time and no spare capital is in a different position from someone with the reverse, and that difference legitimately produces different answers to identical questions.

What the framing changes in practice

Making the choice three-way rather than two-way does not produce a stream of decisions to own nothing. Most of the time the answer remains repair or replace, and the exercise takes about a minute. The value is in the minority of cases where the honest answer is that the item was inherited, rarely used and never really wanted.

It also improves the other two options, because deciding that the thing is genuinely needed makes it easier to spend properly on it rather than buying the cheapest available version out of reluctance. A grudging replacement is often a false economy that breaks again.

These are general mechanisms rather than a rule for any particular household. What is worth repairing depends on local labour costs, what the item does for you and how much spare cash there is — and for anything expensive enough to require borrowing, the borrowing is the larger decision.