Sale

consumer.jpgToday I wound up at consumer world and Christian consumer world ie. Forest Hill Chase (Shopping Centre/Mall) and Koorong (Christian bookstore). Sales were everywhere.

I kind of sometimes don’t see the relevance of a Sale. Nor the relevance of ‘special offers’ I am very, very inclined to be suspicious.

Although bought up to be somewhat of a, ‘go the extra mile for the better value/cost’, it has kind of come hand in hand with (on one end) – if it’s cheap it’s worth getting. My very Dutch-Aussie stinginess counteracts this most of the time, along with my general critical attitude towards admitting that advertising sometimes actually affects me, but there’s often the thought there.

I am – to give you some context – reading No Logo by Naomi Klein at the moment and it is fairly engrossing (might I add utterly fascinating) as well as fairly direct. I shall definitely share more when I plough beyond the first chapter.

The other thing, ‘for sale’ that I/We’ve been looking at the moment are houses. That saying, we aren’t after buying just yet, we are going to rent (Geoff and I when we get married). Rent money is dead money? Yay, nay. We’re not 100% sure we want to spend the rest of our life in the Eastern suburbs and so don’t intend to commit that fully nor want the hassle of later having to sell.

The real-estate institution amuses me no end. It is almost advertising at it’s lying worst. That is perhaps a fraction harsh, however if I could have things my way every advertisement would have the price and a detailed visual (non doctored photos) of every room in the house.

I have no idea what this has to do with sales. I think it is my slightly sleepy brain trying to make an intersection or a road smash between two things in my day.

Meanwhile, lets keep the rain coming down (along with the tree’s in Lilydale) and mosey off into the land of sleep where sales are irrelevant and the world is your oyster and not the house you rent.

But If I was to go off and think more about things I would follow this path:

  • What is value, why do we put value on things, how relevant is value? What is value in it’s proper place and perspective?
  • How much does ‘long term’ play into what we do with money? How often do we follow trends and what is traditionally appropriate?
  • Why don’t I go and treat myself/others more? What is holding me back from spluging now and then in a good and appropriate way and not in a consumeristic loser way?

image credit fotosearch

5 Comments

  1. Auran said:

    Well, the Sale i know has it’s own set of problems today.

    Flashflooding and power outages are our problems at the moment.

    For example, at this very moment, there is a 40cm deep moat around two edges of our property. Not to mention the entire intersection we face is under water.

    😀 Good times!

    June 27, 2007
    Reply
  2. said:

    Value is market-driven. Something is “worth” whatever you can get for it. If you can convince someone to pay $200,000 for your left shoe, that’s still fairly valued as long as they can on-sell it for the same amount. Value is a perception, not an absolute. Worth – that’s your absolute. Something can be valued to be more or less than its worth. If you think about it like that, the dollar figures start to mean a whole lot less.

    As for the buying a house thing, it all depends on your end-game. The returns are probably better if you’re investing in the property market compared with paying rent to someone else so that they can do it instead. If your goal is to own your own home, that’s probably not a terrible idea… but if your goal is to have a roof over your head and be a sensible steward of your financial resources, then buying property versus renting is still a reasonably good choice if you can service the debt involved. Calculate the interest payments involved on a loan for an average priced house, then add up how much you’d be paying in rent in the same amount of time.

    “I kind of sometimes don’t see the relevance of a Sale.”

    As for sales before 30 June, they’re usually designed to get rid of as much stock-on-hand as possible so that there is less to count when the business does its end-of-financial year stocktake.

    June 28, 2007
    Reply
  3. said:

    bec!
    wow i read like 2 paragraphs of this entry, pretty impressive for me, eh?!
    anyway totally agree, if you haven’t seen it gotta show you ‘the corporation’ when we get back, got it on dvd (you consumo! – like my new word?)
    well kinda just commented coz …um … moving on…
    i mean its not………like……..i……….miss………..you ………….or anything. (i’m avoiding eye contact with you in this sentence now.)

    June 29, 2007
    Reply
  4. said:

    “Rent money is dead money”? Well, I reckon it depends on what you’re paying in rent, and what you’re earning…we decided we were better off renting cheaply (we got a bargain by Canberran standards), and saving as hard as we could to get a decent deposit together so we can whack enough off the principle to get the loan + interest down to a serviceable level. There’s no point buying if you can’t service the mortgage!

    July 2, 2007
    Reply
  5. said:

    oh…and then there’s the whole commito-phobe, itchy feet thing…how would we service a mortgage if we were off volunteering somewhere?! 😆

    July 2, 2007
    Reply

Leave a Reply to Auran

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *