I am an avid board gamer. (No, not Monopoly or LIFE. I play Euro-style games that you find in hobby stores or even on the separate shelf at Target these days.) Anyway, as part of my hobby immersion, I spend a lot of time on BoardGameGeek.com. It’s a community/resource for gamers where you can track your games, read reviews, and discuss all things board games. If you take the time to enter your collection, some user-generated tools can tell you the dollar value of your collection. Value should be taken with a grain of salt because any item is only worth what someone is willing to pay at any given time, but the tool tracks general trends in resale prices to give you an estimate.
A few weeks ago, I played with one of the tools for the first time. It was an eye opener. I’m not in the market to sell any games, so price doesn’t matter to me from that point of view. I wanted to know more about what my collection is worth now compared to the original purchase price. Let’s say the current price is less than the original purchase price without giving exact numbers. Remarkably so, until the contrast is startling.
If I had to finish everything today, I wouldn’t be close to getting back what I paid. (And that’s okay because I don’t buy games to sell them. I buy them to play them.) However, this little experiment shows that people tend to overestimate the value of their stuff. Of course I did. The gap between present value and actual cost should be close, if not constant. After all, I have a lot of rare or unpublished games. Shouldn’t that count for more?
No. It could be if I found a collector who is particularly interested in that game, but in the general resale market, most games are worth peanuts. And that’s true of almost everything we buy. (Beanie Babies, anyone?) Very few things are worth more than what you paid for them. Anything that ends up having value usually takes years to get there and you’ll be dead before it arrives. Yet time and time again, we make the mistake of overestimating the value of our possessions. That’s why you see someone in a yard shop who can’t move their stuff. They want too much, and the market will not tolerate it.
In general, this figure is not a problem. We buy things that we will use or enjoy, and that have value beyond the object. A game tool might tell me that a certain game is worth $5, but I know I got hours of fun and fun time out of that game. Probably even more than the original purchase price. That makes the current “value” invalid. By the time I’m ready to finish the game, no money will come close to the amount I got from the game in terms of fun.
However, there are exceptions when the game comes out of the box. I play it several times, and it doesn’t resonate with me. In those cases, resale value becomes more important. I want to get rid of it, but I know I can’t get close to that original purchase price. It is a loss on all sides. I paid money, I didn’t get much pleasure, and I can’t get much money from it. Those are good times. Even though they hurt, I often learn something from them. I learn which games I didn’t like and avoid them in the future. Ouch times end up saving money in the long run if I learn from them.
It would be great to have a tool that could reinvent all of our lives in this way. We need a tool to determine the true value of our things and our knowledge and help us learn from ouchs. If you paid $10,000 for a trip to Tahiti, did you get $10,000 worth of pleasure or life experience from that trip, or was it “worth” very little? Was that restaurant meal really “worth” $50 in terms of quality and enjoyment, or was it worth much less? Did you get $50,000 worth of joy from that new car you’ve been keeping for three years?
Doing an autopsy on everything we’ve experienced can also teach us the true “value” of the things we spend our money on. We will probably realize that we overestimate almost everything in our lives. We do not find happiness or benefit in the things we think we are doing. We abandon the boat and go back a little. Of course, some things come to winners. That trip might have been great, or that piece of furniture was outstanding. But most of our things sit in unused drawers, or we use them a few times and throw them away, or we find out too late that we don’t like x, y, or z.
If we can apply this tool to everything in life, eventually (I hope), we will start making wiser decisions about money. We will see that most of what we buy and spend on is not worth it, either now or later. If there is no such tool, I can only suggest that you mentally write down your things and automatically check your spending. Do you have a pile of stuff lying around that you think could be worth something? Go figure out how much it really is, and you’ll probably stop buying most of it. Ask yourself if you are getting at least as much utility or pleasure from your items as you paid for them.
Of course, this is all up to you and unique to you. But if you think about the value of your things, you will probably change your relationship with things, money, and spending in general. You may find that you no longer want to spend on things you thought were worth it because they are not. And in the end, you may decide that some of the “precious” things are not things at all. They are dollars in the bank to help pay for your future.
Read more:
- Things Are Almost Bad Money
- Your Stuff Is Just Stuff
- Why You Shouldn’t Trade Your Stuff
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