Another idea is sell your old gear. Case in point, recently bought a 6700xt used for $430, but my old 1060 3gb still fetched 88 bucks. So it’s almost like getting a discount since I wouldn’t be using the 1060.
Some folks have issues with buying used/ refurbished stuff but personally I don’t mind too much within reason. For example, I bought a TV for my basement for video games/watch sports etc later last year. I decided I wanted a sound bar and began looking around with Christmas money I’d gotten. I could have spent more but ended up finding an ONN(Walmart brand) sound bar with a subwoofer for something like 26 bucks on eBay. So I bought that and a universal remote for 10 bucks or so that I could program to work my TV, roku and the sound bar.
My wife has complained that sometimes the sound bar is to loud, so I have to turn it down, but for a similar setup I new I probably would have been out at least 100 dollars. I find I like browsing around eBay. Sometimes you find a good deal. Also if you shop at Microcenter in the USA, many times you can find open box deals that are a decent chunk off. I guess the good thing for me is when my wife and I were a little younger, we didn’t always have a lot of cash, but I’ve been a techie for years, so I’d already learned ways to try to cut corners on tech.
Another way, even though this might anger some people, is buying amd. For me their platforms usually have good longevity. This has been true from at least socket am2 for me anyway. For example, I bought a ryzen system with a 1600 and b350 board a few years back. I had a chance to buy from a friend a ryzen 1700 for 100 bucks. I ended up buying second b350 board at the time (it was cheaper than buying a b450 that was the latest tech at the time) I then sold my existing pc to someone as used.
I later upgraded the ryzen 1700 to a 3600. I still have the second b350 board, I sold the 1700 for about 20 dollars less than I’d paid for it a year before, so I essentially rented the cpu for 20-25 bucks.. Recently I discovered that AsRock has a beta bios update for my b350 board that will let me go to ryzen 5000 series. So at some point I may pick up a ryzen 5600 or maybe a 5700x and upgrade the cpu.
The last part works out well however because the system in my wife’s home office she uses is an old Dell optiplex with an i7 3770 from 2013-2014 that I bought used for 50 bucks. Upgraded it to 16gb of ddr3 ram from an old pc that had died, and tossed in a cheap 480gb sata ssd. Those 2 things make that system run great, but I’ll probably hold onto my ryzen 3600 cpu, pick up another board cheap that will support it and a case and then be able to build her another pc from spare parts that will run windows 11 and still be faster than her current system. Or I could probably sell the ryzen 3600 for close to 100 dollars, and basically get a discount on a new cpu purchase. When I go ryzen 5000, I may sit on that a year or two to make it last and let newer tech mature and come down in price.
Apologies for the lengthy read but it gives an idea how a techie like me who likes to have the latest tech is able to upgrade on a relative budget.