Engineers often underspend on tools and assets, building everything from scratch instead. Treat your budget as a target to hit, not a limit to avoid. Buying ready-made assets and plugins trades money for time and unlocks real productivity gains.
Make a budget and spend it. I run into people all the time who are either spending way too much or spending way too little. I've talked to engineers who will absolutely refuse to pay anything for software, for tools that will actually help them. And so they will just slog on and on and on. I've given people budgets of like things where they go ahead and buy like, you know, assets from the Unity Asset Store, right, to go get things that will help them go faster. They don't do it. They keep on building these things themselves or struggling with it. Take the budget and spend it. Now, don't do the opposite, right? I'm not saying go and freely spend and like, go blow your whole— blow all of your wallet on, you know, whatever, right? Like, but there's an idea that if you say, "I'm going to spend a certain amount of money," and then you go spend it, you're able to get a lot of value out of it. Now, remember, the objective is not to stay under the budget, it's to get to the budget. When you do that, you push yourself to ask, "What can I use money on that will allow me to trade off time?" And that's going to lead to real changes.
