When should you upgrade your gear?

It can be a struggle these days to know when to upgrade your gear. With all these new cameras and camera accessories it can be so tempting to buy everything that pops up with an ad on your instagram. With that being said in my personal experience there has always been 2 main reasons for me to upgrade gear.

You don't have to get the most expensive gear out there. If the price of gear correlated to your success as a creator everyone out there would have RED cameras and anamorphic lenses. Most of the time the more expensive gear either doesn't make sense or isn't necessary. As a beginner/ amateur creator you don't need pro series lenses and every prime lens a company makes. As you make more money and as it makes more sense for your business that's when people start to do so, my simple rule of thumb is this: If a piece of gear doesn't make or help make you money why do you need the most expensive or high end items? The difference between a 24-70mm kit lens and pro series 24-70mm lens isn't significant enough to justify the extra money (unless your skill set or business could directly benefit from it). Those pro series lenses aren't going to do anything for you if you aren't doing everything else right. If you shoot auto instead of manual mode, if your lighting is off, if you don't know the basics of composing an image, or you don't know how to edit images correctly those lenses aren't going to make you a better creator. The gear you use doesn't define you as a creator.