You're right about so many new toys. My dad wouldn't have been buying new computers every year.

I've been watching a friend of mine try to make profit by buying at auction and then selling $40K luxury cars. The problem is that people in that market can be really anal. He's spent $850 replacing the bottom part of the seat that had some very faint stains from sun tan lotion from a previous owner. I couldn't see the stain, but my friend could, and so could the last people he showed the car to. He spent the $850 after spending $400 on repeated upholstery treatments that didn't work to permanently get rid of the stain. He'll be lucky to get $500 out of the car by the time he is done. This was the same refrain I heard from him on a $20K car he had a little while back. I he bought it for $2K under what he thought was the market value, but then found it impossible to sell for more than $1K under market value.

I couldn't imagine spending $40K on a car. That would be about 7.5 months of my take home pay. Over half of my gross pay burns up in taxes, health care insurance premiums, and a modest contribution to retirement plan....

I've been thinking about the most expensive things I've bought in my life are. I think this is a pretty good list:

• $35K addition to my house + new roof
• $18K for my BMW motorcycle (finally got $6K back out of it, after just 12K miles, or $1 per mile cost to drive)
• $11K for the mobile home
• $9K for current BMW motorcycle
• $8K for an internet server
• $5K for fujitsu 60 page per minute scanner
• $5K for current volvo stationwagon
• $5K total for 2 servers servers back around 1998
• $4K - probably 3 laptops in that price range
• $3.5K - several vehicles, jeep (ten years ago, now junked), Mercedes stationwagon - long ago junked, Mercedes sedan, 2nd thunderbird, motorhome, '76 cadillac limo
• lots of laptops, PDAs, and desktop computers, in the <$3K range
  • threw away 4 desktop computers recently, probably 4 more in storage and at home
  • PDAs: 4 or 5 HP200LX, at $500-$1K each, windows CE machines: (HP, Casio, Velo), HP 41CV, TI-85
  • cell phones: at least 4 PDA smart phones, average price $500 each
• $2K or less for van, Nissan car, Jetta Diesel car, assorted motorcycles, first thunderbird, motorhome, oldsmobile car
  • $200 Honda CB200T
  • $800 Honda CB750
  • $500 Honda CB450 Four
  • $400 Honda CB350
  • $1500 Honda GL1500 Goldwing
  • $750 Yamaha 750 twin
• $1K for a paper cutter to cut binding off books for the scanner
• Assorted digital cameras $1K or less

So guess overtime it all adds up. But I've always had at least two or three vehicles at any one time. Over the last twelve years, I've spent ($2K (Nissan) + $5K (Volvo) + $18K + $9K (Motorcycles) + $3.5K jeep + $800van + $1K jetta), a bit less than $40K on vehicles. So to drive a car like Kirk's car, that whole time I would have only had a single vehicle to drive around in, and only just now be paying it off. But... Given that two of the vehicles in the list were extravagant, the motorcycles (I could have been just as happy with $2K bikes), I could have easily cut my vehicle purchasing by over half during the last 12 years. So it seems, to maintain cars, I need to spend just a bit more than $1K per year, maybe another $500 a year to also have a motorcycle.

And I guess a lot of money is just spent on living up life. Travelling around, enjoying the experience of being different places. I've gotten used to spending $5 on breakfast at the Adobe cafeteria, and $8 or so on lunch. When I first started working here, that seemed really expensive, I couldn't believe it, the only luxury I could afford for a while before coming here was a couple of items from the $1 menu at McDonalds.

Obviously though, my car budget is way less than my computer budget.

And maybe also my storage budget, which has been $400 a month for the last few years to store thousands of books that I may never look at. Hopefully that will drop to $200 per month be the end of this weekend.

Or the $5K per year I spend sleeping at a hotel for the two days a week I am at my job. I really need to get my van down to that job, and leave it in the parking garage, and learn how to sleep comfortably in the van. Between getting rid of the extra storage, and using it to sleep in, my van can save me $7K a year!

The addition on my house potentially makes me back a bit more than $3K per year, if I get the guy living there to actually pay rent every month, which right now requires a lot of reminders. Just got off the phone with him, he says he'll have this month's money tonight.

So it is possible to live more simply, and save money. Most of my cell phones, always the latest smart phones, and sometimes $100-$200 in extra software, end up being a waste as a computing and organizing devices, I end up going back to using my computer as the computer, and my fancy pda smartphone as just a phone. In the future I should just take the simple free cell phone that the cell phone company offers. Fortunately, I found a hard case for my current PDA phone that has enabled it to last for two or three years, so I've actually cut down on my previous $500 per year cell phone budget.

Of course this pales in comparison to the cell phone bill. I have a data adapter for my laptop so I can have internet absolutely anywhere I want, which given the two nights a week in a hotel, is useful. (Sleeping in my van, I could park where I could access the company wifi, and not need the cell phone data adapter so much). Currently my cell phone bill is about $180 per month, ($2200 a year, or pretty much an entire paycheck.)

Oh, and my stable of domain names. I am probably paying $4K a year to maintain all of them. Plus as much as $800 a month in servers for all of them. I've since cut that down to about $270 a month, plus a $60 per month home internet connection, so I've made real progress on that. Still it's a layout of about $7K, which I currently make back about $5K from amazon and google. So that $2K loss, plus $2K for cell phone, plus $3K per year for laptops and software, plus $2K per year for book storage, so my business is costing me about $9K per year, or 2 months of take home pay. Well, actually I'm managing to get another $4K per year out of Seymour for his server space, so the burn rate is actually only 1 month per year.

But the real problem is like you pointed out, when we are having "needs" our fathers wouldn't have had, and trying to sort out the luxuries from the needs. Do we really need all those services our fathers lived without. Our fathers could have used a simple pocket notebook instead of a PDA. Me, I used them too, but then I worry if I don't have my notes digitized and searchable. So I "need" a pda to take the notes in a digital form to begin with.

But then I want them to be fast. I don't want it to take two or three minutes everytime I need to open it up to take notes. Just the other day, I bought an EEE PC. The screen is small 800x480. Barely enough for windows software. 800x600 mode makes it more usable. But the thing is that it was really really fast to boot up and browse the net. Less than a minute. I get tired of how slow Windows Vista is on the two laptops I regularly use for personal stuff. But the EEE PC with only 4GB, and 2.5 hour battery life, and no room to put all the stuff I "might" need when I am walking around, it's obviously a toy. Why did I buy it? Somewhat it was just the need to want to buy something. Intellectually I should have been able to figure out that it wouldn't be as useful as I might hope. But instead, I had to spend the money, to find out first hand. I am currently agonizing whether to take the machine back to the store and get my $400 back, or to just keep it as a vote with my dollars for the idea of small machines.

So I spent the entire day yesterday rebuilding my tiny fujitsu carry everywhere laptop with Windows XP. Fortunately it was a slow day at work, and I was able to get away with spending the whole day messing around rebuilding my laptop.

Oh, and the $4K sony laptop I bought a couple of trips ago to Malaysia, or the $3K very portable sony I bought on a previous trip? Barely used now... And the $4K laptop is now $1800 or so. Did I really need it, probably not, it's too big I am afraid to really carry it around and use it a lot. So it sits at home at my desk, a place where I am not at too often. The previous giant laptop I was replacing it still in my house too, although it is fairly well dedicated to scanning, when I get around to finding time to do scanning.

Which brings up scanning. I'd love to get lots more books scanned, but I just can't find the time to do enough of it myself to make a real difference. Just scanning books to turn them into bits that require me to spend more and more money on hard drives does no one any good. I don't have the money to pay someone else to do enough scanning to really get rid of enough storage to make a difference. And if I set a rule to put a book online after I scan it, you know how many books I'd actually be able to do in a year, full time? Between 50 and 100 books. That hardly justifies keeping 25,000 in storage. Or even having a $5000 scanner and $1000 book cutter. I could have spent $200 a year to have the bindings lopped off of 100 books a year.....

Even cable TV is probably one of those luxuries, although who is willing to deny themselves a $50 dollar per month ($600 per year) luxury.

Oh well, enough of this trip down memory lane.... Time to get something real work done. Another slow day at work, I'm going to work on finishing the upgrade of my Fujitsu U810 subnotebook UMPC to Windows XP.