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Thursday, January 10, 2008

Value vs Price

My kids, when they were little, had a real hard time with the concept that something is only worth what someone will pay for it. The looked at the advertised price, and that was it's value, new, used, or slightly damaged. Anybody who tried to buy it for less was ripping them off.

I think Siddhartha may have been my first step away from this. If you don't want it, you don't need it, you don't have to buy it, so you don't need the money to buy it. Makes things much simpler. The corollary is don't buy anything that is going to cause you any financial stress.
Also, once you have decided to buy something, don't quibble about five or ten percent for slight variations in the item. Get what you want. You want a DVD player in your coffee maker and it bumps the price form $400 to $500, don't worry, go ahead and get it.

I am trying to figure out what to do with our old Toshiba CRT 27 inch television, complete with wood cabinet TV stand, VCR, DVD Player and TiVo. Do I bother trying to sell it? Or do I give it to Goodwill? VCR & DVD player only cost about $50 each, new. TV was several hundred dollars, but that was years ago. You can't even hardly find a CRT that big anymore. The cabinet is nice enough, but it probably was only about one hundred, maybe two hundred dollars. And what is a TiVo unit worth? A Windows media system that does the same job would probably set you back about $500, but unless you are a talented computer hacker and are willing to spend the necessary time, the TiVo unit is worthless without a subscription. So adding it all up I figure the whole stack of equipment is worth about $100. That is hardly worth the hassle of trying to sell it. Goodwill could sell it all easily, so I should probably just give it all to them.

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