You're told to buy 15 things to start golf. You need about 6.

Walk into a golf shop as a beginner and say so out loud, and you will leave with a shopping list of roughly fifteen items and a lighter bank balance. A rangefinder. A premium ball. A driver that costs more than a flight to Portugal. A glove for each hand, apparently. Here's the thing nobody selling it to you will say: a brand-new golfer needs about six things to get onto a course and start improving, and several of the items pushed hardest will actively slow you down while emptying your wallet. This is the honest starter list — what to buy, what to defer, and what to flatly refuse — written by someone with nothing to sell you a driver over.

The counterintuitive rule: cheaper is usually correct at the start

Golf inverts the normal logic of buying gear. With most equipment, spending more buys you performance you can immediately use. With beginner golf, spending more often buys you performance you cannot yet access and characteristics that make learning harder. A premium tour ball is engineered to reward a fast, consistent swing with spin control most beginners can't produce and will only use to slice more violently into the trees. A five-hundred-dollar driver is a precision instrument for a repeatable motion you don't have yet. The gear can't meet you where you are, so the money is simply wasted — or worse, it's actively unhelpful. Internalise this early and you'll save hundreds: at the start, the correct choice is very often the cheaper one, and that's not a compromise, it's the smart play.

What you actually need (the list of six)

Six things get you playing. One: a set of clubs — a boxed or second-hand starter set is completely fine, and no beginner has ever been held back by their irons. Two: a bag to carry them, and this is the one place a small upgrade earns its keep. A light, comfortable stand bag like the TaylorMade FlexTech carry stand bag makes walking nine holes a pleasure rather than a chore, and comfort is what gets a beginner back for a second round. Three: shoes you'll actually wear. Four: balls you won't cry over losing. Five: a glove. Six: a few tees and a way to practise at home. That's the whole list. Everything else the shop suggested is deferrable, and deferring it is the correct decision.

Buy cheap balls, and buy two kinds

You will lose an astonishing number of golf balls in your first season — into water, into gorse, into the neighbouring fairway and occasionally into orbit. This is normal and it is not the time to be feeding premium urethane balls to a pond. Buy cheap and buy in bulk. The Callaway Warbird is a soft, long-flying, genuinely inexpensive ball that flies far enough to be fun and cheap enough that losing a handful stings not at all. When you've stopped losing a sleeve a round and want a step up that still doesn't cost tour money, the Srixon AD333 is one of the best value balls in the game — a proper performer at a price that lets you play it without flinching. That two-ball progression — Warbird while you're spraying it, AD333 once you're finding fairways — is all the ball strategy a beginner needs for a year.

The single best cheap purchase: foam balls

If there's one item on this list that punches wildly above its cost, it's a pack of foam practice balls. Here's the logic the industry would rather you didn't follow: the fastest way to improve is repetitions, and range balls and green fees make repetitions expensive. Foam balls let you take dozens of swings a day in a back garden or a hallway without breaking a window or a neighbour's patience — real, feel-building reps for the price of a couple of coffees. A beginner who takes twenty swings a day at foam balls for a month will arrive at their first proper round transformed compared to one who only touches a club when they pay to. This is the cheapest performance gain in all of golf, and almost nobody buys it because it isn't shiny.

Shoes: spikeless is plenty

You do not need tour-grade waterproof spikes to start. A comfortable spikeless shoe like the Skechers GO GOLF Elite 6 gives you all the grip a beginner's swing generates, walks like a trainer, and can be worn from the car park to the course to the pub without a second pair. Golf footwear is a genuine rabbit hole of stability platforms and Gore-Tex memberships, and it's a fine one to fall down later. Early on, comfortable and spikeless is the entire specification. Save the money for green fees, which is where improvement actually happens.

The stuff to absolutely NOT buy yet

Now the refusal list, because it matters as much as the buying one. Do not buy a premium tour ball — you'll lose it and can't use its performance; it's money set on fire. Do not buy a five-hundred-dollar driver — a starter-set driver or a cheap second-hand one is more than your swing can currently exploit, and you can buy the good one in a year when you know what you actually need. And do not buy a rangefinder before you can reliably hit a target: knowing it's 147 yards to the pin is useless information when your dispersion is the width of the hole. A rangefinder is a tool for a golfer who has a repeatable distance for each club, which a beginner by definition does not. Every one of these is a purchase the industry pushes hard and a beginner should defer without guilt. More of the genuinely useful, genuinely cheap kit lives in our accessories hub.

The honest bottom line

The golf industry makes its money by convincing beginners that the barrier to entry is expensive gear. It isn't. The barrier is repetitions and time on the course, and the smartest starter budget spends as little as possible on hardware so there's more left for the green fees and foam-ball reps that actually make you better. Buy the six things, refuse the three, and put the difference toward playing. You'll improve faster and enjoy it more than the beginner who arrived with a tour bag full of gear they can't yet use — and you'll have the quiet satisfaction of having seen through the whole pitch.