People use “a stitch in time saves nine" to express that it's better to spend a little time and effort to deal with a problem right now than to wait until later, when it may get worse and take longer to deal with.
The ‘stitch in time’ notion has been current in English for a very long time and is first recorded in Thomas Fuller’s Gnomologia: A Collection of the Proverbs, Maxims and Adages That Inspired Benjamin Franklin and Poor Richard’s Almanack, 1732: