A haircut in San Francisco runs anywhere from $40 to $70 once you tip, and you need one every three or four weeks if you keep it short. Do that math over a year and you are spending five to eight hundred dollars to have someone run a clipper over your head for fifteen minutes. I bought a clipper off Amazon for about $25 and it paid for itself before the first haircut was even finished.

The math is not close #

• Barber, every 3 weeks: call it $45 with tip, roughly 17 times a year. That is about $765 a year, every year, for the rest of your life.
• A clipper off Amazon or Temu: about $25, one time. It lasts for years. Even if you replace it every few years, you are looking at pennies per haircut.

The clipper pays for itself the first time you use it, and then keeps paying you $700-plus a year to spend fifteen minutes on your own hair. There is almost no other purchase with that return.

What to actually buy #

You do not need anything fancy. A basic corded or cordless clipper kit from Amazon or Temu in the $20 to $40 range comes with everything that matters:

• The clipper itself. Corded means you never worry about the battery dying mid-cut. Cordless is more convenient. Either is fine.
• A set of guard combs, usually numbered. The number is the length in eighths of an inch, so a number 3 leaves the hair longer than a number 1. This is the whole trick to a clean, even cut.
• The little cleaning brush and oil it comes with. Use them and the clipper lasts for years.

That is it. Skip the expensive salon-grade stuff. A cheap kit does the identical job on a normal head of hair.

The basic cut #

The video up top shows it, but the short version:

1. Start with a longer guard than you think you need. You can always go shorter. You cannot put hair back. If you want a number 2, do a number 4 first and see how it looks.
2. Go against the direction the hair grows. That is how the clipper actually catches and cuts it evenly.
3. For a simple all-one-length buzz, use one guard over the whole head. Done. This is the easiest, most foolproof cut there is, and it looks sharp.
4. For a basic fade, use a longer guard up top and step down to shorter guards as you go down the sides, blending where they meet. This takes a couple of tries to get smooth, and that is fine.
5. Clean up the neckline and around the ears with no guard, going slow. A cheap trimmer or the corner of the clipper handles the edges.

Two mirrors (or your phone camera propped up) let you see the back. Or rope in a roommate for the back of the neck the first few times.

It does not have to be perfect #

Here is the mental unlock: your hair grows back. A slightly uneven fade is invisible in two days and completely gone in two weeks, at which point you are cutting it again anyway. The stakes are as low as stakes get. The first cut might take you half an hour and look 90 percent as good as the barber. By the third, you are faster than the trip to the barbershop would have been, and you never book an appointment or tip anyone again.

The frugal case #

This is the purest kind of frugal move: a tiny one-time cost that kills a recurring one forever, for a result nobody can tell apart from the expensive version. It is the same logic as buying clothes once and warrantying them for life, just pointed at your own head. Bank the $700 a year and put it somewhere better.

More small decisions that add up to living well in an expensive city are in Frugal SF.