Sensible, and of course I do know how keen-ness to get on makes us jump! However, it never does any harm to buy components – even if we don’t use them right away, they will be there for when we do need them. A couple of years ago I spent about $100 on getting a whole load of caps, resistors, PNP, NPN and silicon diodes of a variety of types and ratings, and stocked up with small plastic slide drawers each carefully labelled with the range, eg. 0.01µf – 0.09µF, 2K – 2K4 etc, with the heavier current / higher voltage values in a different set of drawers. Took a week to set it all up, but now, finding almost any component I want is a breeze, with very few orders having to be placed.
“Oh, so I need a 3K3 1/2W resistor. Here it is. And a 2µ2 cap at 35V, here’s one at 25V, no good, but here’s one at 50V, perfect.”