Paul Folbrecht wrote
Thanks for all the feedback. The common theme is obvious: just know
your limitations, which should go without saying anyway!

Just realize that "knowing your limitations" will usually mean
limiting your use of the instrument rating to conditions that you
could have legally flown VFR. The moment you start using your
instrument rating to fly in weather that isn't legally flyable VFR,
you need to be thinking real hard about what you are doing.

There is a lot of truth to what your friend said.

I get a lot of questions about getting an instrument rating from a lot
of low time pilots. I'm a practicing CFII; these are all potential
customers. I try to talk most of them out of it.

It's not that an instrument rating is inherently bad. No training is
ever bad. If nothing else, you will spend 40 hours flying in a
structured, goal-oriented environment. On top of that, you're
guaranteed to learn SOMETHING about IFR flying.

The problem is this - if you're not flying 2-3 times a week, that
instrument rating is going to come at the cost of something else. If
all it replaces is a bunch of $100 hamburger runs under blue skies and
over familiar territory, then no great loss. But if time and money
are limited, there are lots of things you could do that would be a
better use of limited resources to make you a better, safer, and more
capable pilot.

You could take some training in flying low VFR. If you consider XC
flight over relatively flat terrain with 1000 ft ceilings to be scary
and not doable under VFR, then I assure you that such training will do
far more for your ability to get where you want to go when you want to
get there in a light single than an instrument rating ever will. You
could fly a taildragger or a glider, you could do aerobatics or
formation flying, or you could make cross country mean something and
cross the country.

I'll still be planning on that ticket. Whether or not I go for it some
time is relevant to me at the moment because I'm looking at the purchase
of a C150 or 152 and need to decide if I need IFR cert.

You might consider a Tomahawk instead. I'm seeing a lot of low time
IFR Tomahawks out there in the $20K range. They're not quite as good
a soft/rough field airplane as a C-150, but they are better planes in
every other respect.

Michael