Ross Werner wrote:
I personally think it's a great plan so long as you're still having a
good time while you're waiting for that dream-filled day when you pay
off the house/retire/whatever. Like I said before, if you're living your
life in misery because you're saving so much money so you can have a
debt-free future, then (at least in my opinion) that's not worth it.
Of course, it doesn't sound like you're miserable at all :-) I imagine
you have your own hobbies and you spend your spare time doing things
that you enjoy doing, like posting to the plug list or whatever. It
certainly doesn't have to be blowing hundreds on mp3 players every
couple of years. (That wouldn't make me happy, anyway.)
Between the ages of 8 and 15, I only had about $10. I spent a lot of
time figuring out exactly how to spend it. That $10 was worth so much
to me that I didn't dare spend it on anything less than spectacular.
Not surprisingly, I never found the right thing to spend it on.
However, my research to find the Spectacular Ten Dollar Thing became a
great hobby. I got into electronics and software. I loved the free
catalogs from All Electronics and other distributors. My parents gave
me a Radio Shack 200-in-1 kit for Christmas once and I played with it so
much that I wore out all the springs. People gave me worn out
electronic devices and I did dangerously fun things with the innards.
Now that I have money to spend on a hobby, I've bought a few of the
gadgets I always wanted--but I haven't used them much. It turns out
that I really liked building stuff; playing with a finished, polished
product often isn't very interesting. While it's unfortunate that I
spent a bunch of money on things of low value to me, at least I learned
the lesson before I lost money on some silly music player. :-)
Anyway... now I'm thinking about reviving the electronics hobby, but
this time with the help of some money: getting a real soldering iron, a
multimeter, maybe an oscilloscope, new components instead of recycled
resistors, some kind of computer control module, etc. And I'm going to
have a lot of fun researching exactly what I want to buy.
Shane
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