Thursday, May 22, 2008

Group Therapy Thursday: Regrets, I’ve Had A Few

Tip Of The Day: It’s time again for Group Therapy Thursday, your cheapest form of psychiatric help! This week’s topic is buyer’s remorse. What have you spent money on that you sorely regret?

Tip For Tomorrow: Honestly? I have no clue. Keep reading to learn why.


Further Elucidation Of My Cheap Deal: We’re a bit distracted over here at the Cheap But Not Easy Empire. I’ve been spending time with a handsome young man, and he is keeping me from my Very Important Blog Work. Check out his picture, and I’m sure you’ll see why I’ve been so neglectful of you all:


Yup. He is the cutest thing on Earth. That adorable creature is my nephew, Piglet, in the flesh. Or rather, the photo.

So forgive me if I’m not on point with the posting. I’ll try to muddle through, though, for the good of the Group. Here we go!

This week, we're talking about remorse. Shrinks always want to delve into what’s making us feel bad and guilty, which can get a bit too depressing for me. So let’s keep things on the bright side of life and talk about buyer’s remorse – instead of the guilt we feel for not spending enough time with the kids, or the anger we still feel toward our parents.

Buyer’s remorse is a feeling I RARELY have. I tend to deeply love everything I buy, and relish every minute I have with the new thing I’ve got. Especially if the purchase is jewelry. Or a purse. Ooooo, or SHOES.


However, there’s been a time or two I’ve bought an item that I grow to HATE. For example, the electronic equipment featured below:


That thing is my VERY EXPENSIVE AND HI-TECH DVD player. It has surround sound and a stereo and all sorts of doo-dads and gismos I can’t even begin to understand. It’s also a Sony, which is supposed to be the top of the line for electronics, right? WRONG. The thing sucks rocks. ROCKS, I SAY.

Why? After a year of working just fine, that machine began to NOT play my movies, thus defeating its entire reason for existence. Instead of playing Pride and Prejudice (the Colin Firth version, natch), an error message (Number 13, and what the HELL does that mean?) kept popping up every other time I stuck a DVD into its gaping mouth.

Naturally, because it’s only ONE YEAR OLD, I thought it just needed cleaning. Clearly, it couldn’t actually be broken after just ONE YEAR. So, I bought a head cleaner (hee-hee, head cleaner), and ran it for approximately 50 million hours.

Nothing. I would still randomly get the damn Number 13 error message.

I put up with occasionally not being able to watch the movies I just spent my hard-earned money on for about 7 years. Then, two months ago, the damn thing just gave up the ghost. No amount of cleaning the head, or cleaning the DVDs, or beating it with a stick would make my Sony DVD Player work. So now I’m left with a useless machine that should have A. worked better to begin with and B. lasted longer than it did.

And OF COURSE, when I told a male friend this story? Guess what he said? “Oh, Sony DVD Players always crap out after a year or two.” Right. Because apparently everyone knows this but me.

Now I ask you, the Group, what do you feel buyer’s remorse about? What purchase do you most regret? Sharing is caring AND healing, so feel free to open up (and let’er rip) in the Comments section. Trust me; you’ll feel much better when you’re through.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

A year after buying my Toyota Sequoia, I am weeping openly every time I fill up the tank. I do have 4 kids and two large dogs, so I need a vehicle that size, but DAMN YOU OIL COMPANIES!!!

My mission this weekend is to find a little trailer for my bike so that I can go on weekend shopping trips without having to use my truck.

Anonymous said...

I deeply regret buying a house on a busy street. But this confession would just become depressing and whiny and obnoxious, and no one wants that. So I will say instead that I deeply regret the fact that my gall bladder went crazy and refused to participate in my body anymore, thus necessitating surgery, pancreatic enzymes (every 4 hours) and having to buy new clothes from the weight loss (the only part I don't regret). So I guess I am regretting buying the bigger clothes from before, and not drinking more margaritas while I could.

So there.

Anonymous said...

My regret? Just when I was going manic, I decided to stop buying clothing at thrift stores and start buying retail. Retail CAbi. Retail CAbi in sizes too small because then I was just a mere whisp of a thing, too thin, just wasting away. Then, getting diagnosed with manic depressive illness, gaining weight and not being able to wear any of those VERY expensive clothes. So, I've given some away (the ones that were tailored and thus not the size they started) and the others I sold on e-bay. I'm feeling much better now for having rid my closet of those painful reminders of when I was SKINNY and CRAZY.

Anonymous said...

My laptop. The customer service at Dell is absolutely horrible. They are utterly incompetent and rude, the wait to speak to someone is FOREVER, and they are always trying to push me into buying stuff I don't need at inflated prices. The laptop constantly has a slew problems (the power jack breaks every few months, the computer overheats, etc.) due to design problems very common to the model. Oh yeah, I also purchased the laptop model whose battery was known for literally bursting into flames and exploding, which I discovered later on the internet--but it took me forever to get the replacement battery.

Nikki said...

Probably my Louis Vuitton 2008 spring collection purse. You see, I lovvveee it, but because it was so expensive ($1040 to be exact), I find myself making tons of excuses not to carrying anywhere. Plus, when I do carry it, I'm paranoid about not getting it dirty, rubbing it up against anything, not setting it on the floor; you know, all the stuff I do will all my other purses. It's not even fun to carry it because of that!! As we speak, it's sitting in my closet carefully placed in it's dustbag. I realized it right after I bought it, but couldn't return it (even tho it was unused) because LV Boutiques have a crazy strict return policy. Lesson learned!

Second thing I regret buying is a brand new car. Mind you, it's now 5 years old. But I could have paid much less for a car that was 1-2 yrs old and could have let the first owner get stuck with the depreciation!!!