Many Americans have been buying houses during this pandemic, thanks to record-low mortgage rates and a desire to move out of congested areas. Being a new homeowner, however, can be a very expensive endeavor. Aside from the cost of buying and refurbishing a house, a new homeowner can also expect to spend thousands of dollars on new appliances.

According to the National Association of Home Builders, a new home buyer will spend approximately over $3,000 on new appliances, over $1,000 more than someone buying a house. If you want to save on money after buying a home, it is essential that you can tell which appliances are essential and which are optional.

Below is a guide that can help you whittle down your appliance shopping list.

The Essential Items

What is considered essential depends on your circumstances. For example, a business may need machines from a cobots company to function while a real estate agent doesn’t. The same can be said off appliances and homeowners. However, the following appliances are considered to be almost universally essential if you want to live comfortably.

A refrigerator helps preserve your food and ensures that you can save even more money. It’s most especially useful when you rely on takeout food and deliveries for sustenance, which is possible if you and the people you live with are extremely busy. A refrigerator can help you keep these food items fresher for longer, preventing the need of buying more every meal.

Kitchen ranges are ubiquitous in detached housing units, most often connected to gas lines, unlike the electrical counterparts often found in apartments. Stove and oven combos are more expensive, but they do open up a wider range of cooking options. If you like eating freshly cooked food instead of ordering everything from restaurants, stoves and ovens are a must have.

If you lived a long time in an apartment complex, you may have gotten used to taking your dirty clothes to a communal laundry room or even to the closest laundromat for cleaning. Living in your own home is expensive enough as it is and a washing machine with a dryer can go a long way in keeping your bills low.

Dryers may seem optional at first, but there’s no guarantee you will be around to hang your laundry outdoors or that every day will be sunny enough o quickly dry your clothing. Play it safe and purchase a dryer instead.

Alas, desktop computers are no longer the standard device of the era. Many laptops are now capable of the things a desktop can do all while remaining portable. Professionals who often work on the go are bound to consider a top-notch laptop an essential addition to a home.

If you have kids in high school or college, you can research the best laptops for kids to ensure that they have a way to do their schoolwork and entertain themselves.

The Optional Items

Not every item in the appliance section is a must-have. For you to spend less than the average $3,000 dollars on appliances, you must learn which item is important.

Below are some less important but tempting appliances you might run into at an online store or an outlet shop.

Microwaves are essential if you live in an apartment, are a college student or if you don’t have any cooking skills at all. If you have a kitchen range, you can whip up almost every food a microwave can cook, albeit at a much slower pace. It also won’t cost several hundreds of dollars to do it.

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Blenders are essential if you make a lot of smoothies and fruit shakes. This can be true if you love fresh fruits or really into fitness eating habits, but if you only make a shake once a month, you may be better of buying it from the nearest store than ordering a bulky appliance that will only gather dust most of the time.

Once considered the epitome of home cleaning gadgets, vacuum cleaners are really only very useful if you have extensive carpeting or pets who shed a lot of hair. Otherwise, much of what a vacuum cleaner can do can be replicated cheaply by a standard broom and dustpan. These simple devices also don’t generate a lot of distressing noise for pets and don’t consume any electricity at all.

Finally, the television is no longer as essential as it used to be. With the rise of streaming services and YouTube, more people, especially younger people, prefer to watch their shows on laptops and mobile devices. A television can still be useful if you want to have family movie nights or have a gaming console, but otherwise, it can be an expensive piece of electronics that you seldom use.

Appliances should be convenient, not endless money-pits. Learning to discern which devices are essential and which can be safely put aside for another time can do wonders for your budget.