Posted: 10/14/2009 9:31:43 AM EDT
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I know this has been discussed before but I have a tendency to buy two to three of each item (especially if it is on sale). My philosophy is that my kids may be young but some day they will be teenagers/adults. In a way I fear that prices will be prohibitive for certain things. If I get a pair of boots that are a size too small for me I just wrap them up and throw them in a box, mark it, and wait. For instance, I got a free pair of new gore-tex boots that were too small but I could not help but think of my son or a family member that may one day come my way with their feet wrapped in rags.
Is there something wrong with me or am I just practical? Do not get me wrong, I do not hold onto junk (old furniture, trinkets, other crap) if I see no use for it but some things I hold onto. |
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I'm the same way, I think it was from being taught not to be wasteful. I think its from being taught to be self sufficient and not to depend on someone else to care for you. Think of how much money the Country would have if everyone had the same mindset. |
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This type of behavior is clearly a mental illness! I was watching a show called "Hoarders" on discovery channel, I think it was DC but either way they clearly show that this is not an acceptable way of life and leads to many bad things... I think that you should take serious stock of what your life has become and make a few trips to the Salvation Army before this gets out of hand!
Just teasing, you're among friends here! I question the commitment of the prepper that doesn't have a few extra pairs of boots that fit no one in the family. Kind of goes with the territory! Keep up the good work! Prepper |
| Living in DC area makes me sick. Fed. offices buy up items they do not need at end of year so they can justify their budgets. Then they sell their year old items on auction for pennies on the dollar to people who sell them to us for market value. Sickening. I once saw a fed agency office throwing out perfectly good monitors, furniture, etc. in a huge garbage bin. Have they not heard of posting them for free online??? |
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Is something wrong?
That depends on your motives and methods. When I had to help move my grandmother into assisted living she had at least 3 freezers. These had to be emptied. I had to use field disposal methods (pit in yard) hey it's compost. I hauled out turkey bones from 20+ year old holiday meals, no meat just bones. green beans from the garden 24 or 25 years old. I just about regurgitated lunch into that pit too. 
So to discuss the boots. What is their shelf life? I know you might think it is indefinite but do you know that the materials will not decay? Are you so obsessed with footwear that your kids would rather bur the house than haul out the shoes when you pass on? Could you invest the money better? Don't forget to include the cost of inventory work and storage. If you invest the money that you spend on a pair of boots and the storage cost into something that outperforms inflation. Then when you need boots in the future that money you invested will buy the boots and there will be some extra money still working (remember you did outperform inflation). Could you learn to make custom footwear? This would raise the quality and fit of the footwear available to you and fix your labor cost. |
| The hard part is storage space. At least my wife agrees on buying items years in advance, especially if it is a great deal. My wife bought clothes with tags on them at Deseret Industries (out west) years ago for next to nothing- for kids we didn't even have yet. Now we are glad we did. It was a small sacrifice -hauling Rubbermaid bins around. |
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Is something wrong? That depends on your motives and methods. When I had to help move my grandmother into assisted living she had at least 3 freezers. These had to be emptied. I had to use field disposal methods (pit in yard) hey it's compost. I hauled out turkey bones from 20+ year old holiday meals, no meat just bones. green beans from the garden 24 or 25 years old. I just about regurgitated lunch into that pit too.
So to discuss the boots. What is their shelf life? I know you might think it is indefinite but do you know that the materials will not decay? Are you so obsessed with footwear that your kids would rather bur the house than haul out the shoes when you pass on? Could you invest the money better? Don't forget to include the cost of inventory work and storage. If you invest the money that you spend on a pair of boots and the storage cost into something that outperforms inflation. Then when you need boots in the future that money you invested will buy the boots and there will be some extra money still working (remember you did outperform inflation). Could you learn to make custom footwear? This would raise the quality and fit of the footwear available to you and fix your labor cost. great points. thanks. Your grandmother sounds like mine. When she died my dad had to dispose of the 20 year old canned rabbit meat. We just were not sure if the method of storage was right. On the storage issue. I am not taking decades of storage but 5-7 years. I have mil surp boots from 1970's and they are tough as nails and they only cost me $17 bucks. My son cannot wait to become a Scout and will need rugged gear. I wish my dad had kept his eye out for things years ago but... hindsight is 20/20. |
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Is something wrong? That depends on your motives and methods. When I had to help move my grandmother into assisted living she had at least 3 freezers. These had to be emptied. I had to use field disposal methods (pit in yard) hey it's compost. I hauled out turkey bones from 20+ year old holiday meals, no meat just bones. green beans from the garden 24 or 25 years old. I just about regurgitated lunch into that pit too.
So to discuss the boots. What is their shelf life? I know you might think it is indefinite but do you know that the materials will not decay? Are you so obsessed with footwear that your kids would rather bur the house than haul out the shoes when you pass on? Could you invest the money better? Don't forget to include the cost of inventory work and storage. If you invest the money that you spend on a pair of boots and the storage cost into something that outperforms inflation. Then when you need boots in the future that money you invested will buy the boots and there will be some extra money still working (remember you did outperform inflation). Could you learn to make custom footwear? This would raise the quality and fit of the footwear available to you and fix your labor cost. great points. thanks. Your grandmother sounds like mine. When she died my dad had to dispose of the 20 year old canned rabbit meat. We just were not sure if the method of storage was right. On the storage issue. I am not taking decades of storage but 5-7 years. I have mil surp boots from 1970's and they are tough as nails and they only cost me $17 bucks. My son cannot wait to become a Scout and will need rugged gear. I wish my dad had kept his eye out for things years ago but... hindsight is 20/20. Just as an example: I pay less now for top quality tires than I did for my first car. I paid a penny per mile then. Now I pay less than a penny a mile. Same brand same traction rating. Now the penny is worth less. So my current real per mile tire cost is about half of what it was then. If I had bought a set of tires then for $400 the real value today would be a $1200 loss, and I'm not including storage costs. The loss is created because the tire size then is useless to me now. Do you know that your kids will be able to wear the boots? Bad fitting footwear can break the bones on your feet, I've been there and done that and got the med records to prove it. For several generations the Chinese thought it fashionable to destroy a child's feet by binding the feet so that the feet could not grow. So the point of my questions is to help you address the why of your collecting footwear, and to help you address the how of having the best fitting and best quality footwear that can be gotten. Did you have do do without footwear at some important time? You sound like a guy I know that had some bad times due to the lack of a BOV, he now has a BOV obsessive disorder. The point of collecting is to make money, utility, or fun. Money is made by collecting things that gain value faster than inflation, and selling at profit; stock market, investing, etc. Utility is made by buying and holding things that are likely to not be available in the future; fixed supply items (land), and preban items (mags, MFCs). Fun is made because you have fun using the item(s); TJ's boats, bicycles for me and my kids, air cooled VWs for a friend of mine, etc. |
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Is something wrong? That depends on your motives and methods. When I had to help move my grandmother into assisted living she had at least 3 freezers. These had to be emptied. I had to use field disposal methods (pit in yard) hey it's compost. I hauled out turkey bones from 20+ year old holiday meals, no meat just bones. green beans from the garden 24 or 25 years old. I just about regurgitated lunch into that pit too.
So to discuss the boots. What is their shelf life? I know you might think it is indefinite but do you know that the materials will not decay? Are you so obsessed with footwear that your kids would rather bur the house than haul out the shoes when you pass on? Could you invest the money better? Don't forget to include the cost of inventory work and storage. If you invest the money that you spend on a pair of boots and the storage cost into something that outperforms inflation. Then when you need boots in the future that money you invested will buy the boots and there will be some extra money still working (remember you did outperform inflation). Could you learn to make custom footwear? This would raise the quality and fit of the footwear available to you and fix your labor cost. great points. thanks. Your grandmother sounds like mine. When she died my dad had to dispose of the 20 year old canned rabbit meat. We just were not sure if the method of storage was right. On the storage issue. I am not taking decades of storage but 5-7 years. I have mil surp boots from 1970's and they are tough as nails and they only cost me $17 bucks. My son cannot wait to become a Scout and will need rugged gear. I wish my dad had kept his eye out for things years ago but... hindsight is 20/20. Just as an example: I pay less now for top quality tires than I did for my first car. I paid a penny per mile then. Now I pay less than a penny a mile. Same brand same traction rating. Now the penny is worth less. So my current real per mile tire cost is about half of what it was then. If I had bought a set of tires then for $400 the real value today would be a $1200 loss, and I'm not including storage costs. The loss is created because the tire size then is useless to me now. Do you know that your kids will be able to wear the boots? Bad fitting footwear can break the bones on your feet, I've been there and done that and got the med records to prove it. For several generations the Chinese thought it fashionable to destroy a child's feet by binding the feet so that the feet could not grow. So the point of my questions is to help you address the why of your collecting footwear, and to help you address the how of having the best fitting and best quality footwear that can be gotten. Did you have do do without footwear at some important time? You sound like a guy I know that had some bad times due to the lack of a BOV, he now has a BOV obsessive disorder. The point of collecting is to make money, utility, or fun. Money is made by collecting things that gain value faster than inflation, and selling at profit; stock market, investing, etc. Utility is made by buying and holding things that are likely to not be available in the future; fixed supply items (land), and preban items (mags, MFCs). Fun is made because you have fun using the item(s); TJ's boats, bicycles for me and my kids, air cooled VWs for a friend of mine, etc. I do not see the storage cost as anything since I have a bit. I am not looking at storing and using every item even if that means hurting my kids. |
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You have to keep things in check though fellas.
I was raised by my grandparents whom caught the tail end of the depression. My grandfather taught me to buy cheap and stack deep. The only problem with this (which he experieinced as well) is that you have to have room and need for it all. My house is only 1k sq ft and my garage is 500 sq ft. I now have to do a strange hula dance to get through my living room dining room area and a similar dance to get through my bedroom. I have gone through it all and thinned out all of the "crap" and still have this to deal with..... I just need my own underground warehouse. |
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Living in DC area makes me sick. Fed. offices buy up items they do not need at end of year so they can justify their budgets. Then they sell their year old items on auction for pennies on the dollar to people who sell them to us for market value. Sickening. I once saw a fed agency office throwing out perfectly good monitors, furniture, etc. in a huge garbage bin. Have they not heard of posting them for free online??? Well, its not really that simple. All gov auction stuff is available to nearly everyone. The only limitation is medical equipment, and then it has to go to somebody that has a medical license or a reseller that will only resell to somebody with a license (there may be other categories too but that is the one I'm aware of). Anything else that the gov gets rid of by sale, is available to everybody for purchase through one of the various gov auction websites etc. On the other hand, I don't think they can just give things away for free (certainly you would understand that it would then become a problem that they would always be buying new things, and giving the old to their friends, for their friends to later give back to them). So it either gets pitched in a dumpster as scrap, or it gets sold via auction. There is a LOT of red tape to cut through to list stuff like that on an auction, so its often easier to just pitch it in a dumpster, then you can dig it out if you wish (they just can't directly give it to you). I work for the government. Funny thing is, right now I need some specialized fittings from Adel Wiggins for some units that I'm working on. Adel Wiggins doesn't sell many of these because they're 60's technology, so its not a standard item, but they'll produce them for the right money. Well, I only need 9 of them, and for Wiggins to tool up to make 9 of them, they want $4,000 each for them. The biggest disappointment of it all, the federal stock system carries these fittings, but they're limited to air force use only because the air force is the only branch that runs this equipment. Well, I'm Navy, but I'm working on Air Force equipment right now; I still can't get these fittings even though its Air Force equipment. So we did some checking around, somebody has these for sale as Gov surplus for $875 each. HUGE money savings, but the person probably paid a few dollars for them when they bought a huge lot of misc. government surplus a while back. So the gov sold these off a few years ago (who knows how many years ago?) and now we're trying to buy them back at probably 1,000,000% markup, but its still less than 25% of the price to get new ones made, so it still seems like a really good deal. That is the biggest flaw that I can see with the government, when considering warehouse space etc. "space is money" so you can't keep stuff sitting around for long, if you haven't used it recently, it has to go. I needed 1 small o-ring the other day; I asked around in our department and they said that because our group doesn't use o-rings often, we had to get rid of all of them. So I had to order a pack of 100 o-rings, so I could take 1 o-ring out, and now the next time we have a "lean event" those 99 o-rings will get thrown away. I haven't even gotten to the good stuff yet; In our shop we have a cnc laser welder to seal hermetically sealed radar units etc. Last time they had a lean event, the people in charge had determined that the manuals for the laser welder had not been used recently, so those needed to be thrown out. Well, guess what, the laser welder started having problems and they needed the manual to troubleshoot it. So they had to buy a new manual and pay overnight shipping to have it sent to us so we could resume production the next day. Anyways, the government could be operated much, much more efficiently. Rant Off |
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My wife's a big proponent of thrift stores and has saved us a boatload of money over the years. Mostly this has been on kids' clothing and footwear. What keeps her from being a "hoarder" is that she doesn't buy stuff that we might need in the future, she buys stuff that we will need in the future. She has a mental inventory of what we have stored and when she runs across something cheap that we need she buys it.....even if the need is a few years from being actual. Ever try to find never worn kid's boots for $1 right when you need it? It's hard to do. Compare this to my wife's sister's approach: she buys new stuff right when she needs it. She's spent literally thousands of dollars on kid's clothes. The kid gets a brand name piece of clothing with a fancy label, wears it twice, then off it goes to the thrift store. Makes no sense to me. |
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Another take on the "one is none" philosophy is about redundancy in problem solving. In an emergency, it's vital to have more than one method to solve a given problem. Equipment fails, and backups can fail as well-particularly when a piece of equipment is pushed beyond it's intended duty cycle (a generator is a perfect example).
I've worked hard to have at least three independent methods to solve major issues that come up in an emergency. Keeping my family warm in the winter, cooking food, water filtration, power generation, and self defense are areas that I've dedicated not only a lot of equipment and training, but a lot of different methodologies as well. My backup plans for generating heat, for example, look something like this: Primary: Natural gas furnace with grid-powered blower Primary backup: Natural gas furnace with generator-powered blower Secondary backup: Portable propane heaters Tertiary backup: Portable kerosene heaters Quarternary backup: Portable electric heaters powered by generator |
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Living in DC area makes me sick. Fed. offices buy up items they do not need at end of year so they can justify their budgets. Then they sell their year old items on auction for pennies on the dollar to people who sell them to us for market value. Sickening. I once saw a fed agency office throwing out perfectly good monitors, furniture, etc. in a huge garbage bin. Have they not heard of posting them for free online??? I guess this is one benefit of having contractors. Where I worked we employees were notified if the parent company was getting rid of furniture, and we could take it home first-come, first served. I picked up several supply cabinets whose only problem was that the locks were broken. Hey, plenty of stuff in the garage needs to be stored neatly, but not secured. I could see destroying certain computer components like hard drives so as to protect data, but monitors? I suspect many .gov orgs throw away better stuff than I use at home. 
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Living in DC area makes me sick. Fed. offices buy up items they do not need at end of year so they can justify their budgets. Then they sell their year old items on auction for pennies on the dollar to people who sell them to us for market value. Sickening. I once saw a fed agency office throwing out perfectly good monitors, furniture, etc. in a huge garbage bin. Have they not heard of posting them for free online??? I guess this is one benefit of having contractors. Where I worked we employees were notified if the parent company was getting rid of furniture, and we could take it home first-come, first served. I picked up several supply cabinets whose only problem was that the locks were broken. Hey, plenty of stuff in the garage needs to be stored neatly, but not secured. I could see destroying certain computer components like hard drives so as to protect data, but monitors? I suspect many .gov orgs throw away better stuff than I use at home.
Until another company gets the contract, then your job isn't necessarily secure. I'll stick with being a gov employee for now. There are ripples going through our group right now because a certain contractor didn't win renewal of their contract and some people didn't get offers from the new contractor for a job. So now they have to worry about if they've lost their job, or if it was just a simple oversight of the new contractor. |
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Living in DC area makes me sick. Fed. offices buy up items they do not need at end of year so they can justify their budgets. Then they sell their year old items on auction for pennies on the dollar to people who sell them to us for market value. Sickening. I once saw a fed agency office throwing out perfectly good monitors, furniture, etc. in a huge garbage bin. Have they not heard of posting them for free online??? I guess this is one benefit of having contractors. Where I worked we employees were notified if the parent company was getting rid of furniture, and we could take it home first-come, first served. I picked up several supply cabinets whose only problem was that the locks were broken. Hey, plenty of stuff in the garage needs to be stored neatly, but not secured. I could see destroying certain computer components like hard drives so as to protect data, but monitors? I suspect many .gov orgs throw away better stuff than I use at home.
Heck, I've worked for companies selling to the Fed for years. I've seen the end of fiscal year feeding frenzy up close & personal. "I have $200,000 I need to spend, what do you have in stock? HP Laser Jets? I'll take a pallet of them." Or years ago where a .gov worker got caught taking kickbacks from a computer paper supplier (think 'greenbar'). Pallets of the paper would show up at Receiving, then go immediately to Shipping to be sent out for recycling. Regarding the OP, I have always bought cheap for future needs. Not just food, but things for repair around my house or for friends. Hardware, electrical & plumbing components, anything that might be of future use is fair yard-sale game. |
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Living in DC area makes me sick. Fed. offices buy up items they do not need at end of year so they can justify their budgets. Then they sell their year old items on auction for pennies on the dollar to people who sell them to us for market value. Sickening. I once saw a fed agency office throwing out perfectly good monitors, furniture, etc. in a huge garbage bin. Have they not heard of posting them for free online??? I guess this is one benefit of having contractors. Where I worked we employees were notified if the parent company was getting rid of furniture, and we could take it home first-come, first served. I picked up several supply cabinets whose only problem was that the locks were broken. Hey, plenty of stuff in the garage needs to be stored neatly, but not secured. I could see destroying certain computer components like hard drives so as to protect data, but monitors? I suspect many .gov orgs throw away better stuff than I use at home.
Until another company gets the contract, then your job isn't necessarily secure. I'll stick with being a gov employee for now. There are ripples going through our group right now because a certain contractor didn't win renewal of their contract and some people didn't get offers from the new contractor for a job. So now they have to worry about if they've lost their job, or if it was just a simple oversight of the new contractor. UGH !! brings back memories.....used to be a defence contractor......lost our contract to a company that had no cle what the hell they were doing......They hired me but I was the only guy who stayed....(small tight knit world I worked in).........It sucked......I left after 8 months of pulling their asses out of the fire with the Govt big wigs......They lost the contrct next go round.....dont miss that world |