Starched Shirts

I'll follow Keegan's excellent post with another clothing-related item. As she emphasized, being thrifty doesn’t mean you have to look cheap. Over the past several years, I have become a snob for crisp-looking starched dress shirts. They look way better than shirts that have only been ironed with water—sharper, newer, and more professional. Even shirts claiming to be “wrinkle free” aren’t really wrinkle free. They just look less sloppy than non-wrinkle free shirts when you don’t iron them, but they still look sloppy. And for those of us looking to enter the job market soon, looking sharp is important. The problem is that taking your shirts to the cleaners gets expensive really quick. There is a great alternative. You can buy starch at the grocery store and use it instead of water when ironing dress shirts. I use a light starch called Magic Sizing which costs about $1 at Walmart and lasts for quite a while.

It takes time to iron your own shirts, so I’m guessing that at some point in the distant future, when my time is worth more than it takes me to iron my shirts, I’ll take them to the cleaners. In the meantime, it pays to do it myself and save.