We just bought our first house. The 30 gallon water heater knocks. I’m told this is due to rust build up and will eventually need to be replaced. It will only fill up our jetted tub about halfway and then run out of hot water. We can’t use the jets then.

My husband also brought home two beagle pups to go with our 4 year old beagle dog. For breeding and for hunting. Both will provide for us, so it is a good thing to have the pups.

After purchasing our first home we soon realized that mowing and raking is a full time job on almost two acres. We had a tractor from hubbys dad but the raking was near impossible.

Back to the garage sales.

I found a 40 gallon water heater that goes in the basement (not my bedroom closet) that had only been used for 2 years and was only 5 years old. I feel it was a steal for $45.00. This is something that we would have been purchasing later for up to $300.00.

I found a dog crate for the puppies for only $5.00. I can put the pups in the kennel when I am not home or at night to avoid puppy potties around my home.

Finally I found a yard rake for $30.00. It attaches to the back of the tractor and rakes as you mow.

They mostly were splurge purchases but we were eventually going to get them. So I feel as if I did well. I know there were many other things that I could have purchased but only got the things we have talked about.

As for the VCR tapes. I had the same realization. We only really bought children’s ones (or more accurately, asked for them as gifts) and a selection of our favourite movies.

I’m ADD and I find that popping a movie on keeps me in the room thus I have a better chance of staying on task (i.e. polishing silver, filing papers, cleaning the kitchen, switching over my summer and winter wardrobes). We have about 2 dozen real favourites that I have watched at least 8 times each but even with those, we are just approaching break even on the ones we bought new.

With DVDs I resolved to be stricter and we belonged to the Canadian Netflix equivalent. That works out to be the equivalent of buying between 1 & 1.5 videos per month, but I can get up to 15 a month.

Because you can have several at a time and can keep them indefinitely, it is a nice compromise between owning (can watch when you get time) and renting (cheap cost per unit.) It works especially well for tv series and as a result, we don’t have cable; we just wait for the quality series to come out on dvd. We are never current, but we do get to see all the good stuff.

Way to Go!

Jim – this sale did have quite a few antique-ish things. They could be worth money down the road but I think about the opportunity cost. Could that money be spent someplace better right now and perhaps provide a better dividend down the road. My terminology may be incorrect, so I hope everyone understands where I was going with that.

It’s very true that they VCR tapes might have brought hours of enjoyment to the couple here. I related those tapes to our situation. We have bought tapes in the past to only watch them once. Then they sat on a shelf collecting dust. For us, that is not a wise choice for entertainment. It’s much better for us to rent a 99 cent movie.

But everyone’s situation is different. Like Beth said above, my values are changing. Stuff isn’t as important to me know. I’m slowly changing back to the values I had while growing up…where you make do with what you have and not go out and buy things you can’t afford on plastic. For me, I guess it took getting buried in debt to realize that.

Did you end up buying anything?

By the way congrats on hitting 2000 rss readers!

If anyone can figure out how to get my nutcracker bowl to pay dividends – let me know LOL

This purchase is still paying dividends as we speak