My Dumbest Purchase Ever
Ever since I started my debt reduction journey, I’ve started to read more and more personal finance blogs. And you know, personal finance bloggers link to each other. A lot. Crazy, isn’t it? When you are doing something difficult, it’s a bit easier when you hook up with a bunch of other people trying to make the same changes in their lives? (Sounds a bit like weightloss bloggers too, actually.)
Anyways, that’s how I came across the blog Debt Kid. I don’t even remember whose blog I clicked through from, but I found an entry where he proclaims dumbest purchase ever was a Nintendo DS lite. Typical of your middle of the night Walmart runs, and he hasn’t even played it in months. So he asked the blogosphere to share their dumbest purchases ever for a chance to win his!
It didn’t take me more than 30 seconds to decide which was my dumbest purchase. It’s my laptop. You might be thinking, but JENNIFER! That’s your computer… your lifeline to the internet. And you’d be right. I use this laptop every single day. I connect with people around the globe, I’ve met some of the most amazing friends I’ve ever had in my life, and I’ve even managed to make a little money on the side. So why on earth do I call it my dumbest purchase ever?
Because until the day that I purchased this laptop from Dell, I never carried a balance on my credit cards. I had two cards, and I always paid the balance off in full every month. Sure, there may have been a month or two in college where I carried over a small balance (like Christmas presents bought in November and paid for when I worked over Christmas break), but for the most part those cards stayed very close to zero. And then I decided that my desktop computer needed replaced, I needed a laptop and I needed it NOW. I couldn’t afford it, and rather than saving up my money for it I decided to buy it on credit. I didn’t even have one credit card with a high enough limit to finance the purchase so I split it between two cards. It was more than I could pay off the next month, so for the first time I carried a balance on two cards and not a small balance at that. It was the catalyst for the debt that I have now… it made it easy to justify buying things I couldn’t afford, and letting the balance rot on my credit cards. The day I sat down to start this debt reduction I realized I had gone from two cards with no balances to four cards and credit card debt of approximately $11,000. Add that to my $20,000 of student loans and you can understand why I felt like I was drowning. When you look at it that way, you can’t help but wonder if laptop rental might have been a little more cost-effective in the long run! LOL
I don’t regret buying my laptop. I do regret buying it on credit before I could afford it, and then not diligently paying it back. Instead, it became easier to justify larger purchases elsewhere. $200 didn’t seem bad when I’d just spent $2,000 on a computer! So yes, I’ve gotten good use out of my computer, and still do, but when I look at the avalanche of debt it seems to have created, I definitely believe it was my dumbest purchase ever!
