One Million and Beyond

An Expensive Weekend

By Matt - Monday, November 20th, 2006

It’s been close to half a year since I bought myself something for the sake of buying something. This weekend that changed, at least to some extent. I needed to buy myself some hockey gear and I decided that this was both the weekend and I wasn’t going to be uber cheap about it. I got myself a decent hockey helmet to keep my brain from falling apart during a game. Overall the $190 investment was more an investment than splurging on something for myself.

With that said it turned out ot be a pretty expensive weekend all around. I needed to buy my parents birthday presents so I got them combo birthday-Christmas presents. On top of all of this we got some stuff for the wedding already. Between all three I spent close to $500 which is a fairly large amount of money regardless of the fact that I’m trying to get out of debt. Was it worth it? Yes and here’s why: The presents are going to make Christmas that much cheaper when it comes (two smaller gifts as opposed to a couple bigger ones) and the hockey helmet will hopefully prevent me from getting injured (the old one was on its last legs and I was being asked to replace it by a couple people). Between those two items alone I think it was worth the money; I made three people happy with the purchases and reduced the future impact on the pocket book.

I know its hard to justify the potential impact of an injury monetarily but it’s happened in the past and I wouldn’t want poor equipment being the reason that I had to miss work or worse. Did I need to spend as much money as I did on it? Realistically no, but I don’t often buy myself anything and I really enjoy hockey so it made sense to purchase a bit better than the lowest rung equipment.

This will have an impact on my monthly spending this month since I wasn’t expecting to spend any of the money but I did. I’ll have to raid the change jar and put that money into the checking account; thankfully in Canada we’ve got $1 and $2 coins which I hate as much as any other change and my change jar is up to $200-300 dollars. It just goes to show that although sometimes spontaneity in spending can be good and at times even necessary the impact can be more long term; you just have to be aware of it and keep it in mind regardless of the purchase.

Technorati Tags: spending, spontaneity, hockey equipment, consumerism

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