Getting Your Money’s Worth

Today’s been a nice, rest­ful, quiet Sun­day for my fam­ily.  I’ve spent the after­noon put­ter­ing and pon­der­ing.  Right in the mid­dle of fold­ing laun­dry, at the end of a con­vo­luted train-of-thought, I heard myself think the phrase get­ting your money’s worth and my brain did a lit­tle double-take.  Get­ting your money’s worth — what exactly does that mean?  How do I mea­sure whether or not I’ve got­ten my money’s worth on a pur­chase or expenditure?

After some thought I’ve come to a few conclusions:

First, the deter­mi­na­tion is com­pletely sub­jec­tive.  Pur­chases and expe­ri­ences that meet my money’s worth cri­te­ria might com­pletely fail if sub­jected to The Husband’s (or The Daughter’s or The Son’s or your) criteria.

Sec­ond, the deter­mi­na­tion cri­te­ria is not sta­tic.  A pur­chase that would resound­ingly meet my money’s worth cri­te­ria today could very well fail next week’s cri­te­ria sim­ply because my cri­te­ria might be dif­fer­ent next week.  Most cer­tainly things that I con­sid­ered worth my money 20 years ago aren’t even on the radar today — and vice versa.

Third, the amount of money spent has lit­tle or noth­ing to do with money’s worth.  I’ve made pur­chases for under a dol­lar that were def­i­nitely not worth my money.  Con­versely, I’ve spent thou­sands, tens of thou­sands, even hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars (in the case of our house) on items on which I feel very con­fi­dently that I’ve got­ten my money’s worth.

Fourth, degree of plea­sure derived is only a small per­cent­age of over­all money’s worth cri­te­ria.  I was sur­prised at how lit­tle the issue of “did it bring me plea­sure” played into my con­sid­er­a­tion.  I would not con­sider myself a pleasure-seeker, still I expected plea­sure derived to play a much larger part in my judg­ing process.

Fifth, time is a very impor­tant fac­tor.  A prod­uct has to sur­vive the “hon­ey­moon” period before it can truly be deemed worth the money.  And a pur­chase can lose it’s worth the money des­ig­na­tion at any point if some­thing goes wrong.

As I look around my house, I’m look­ing at things with a fresh pair of eyes.  What have I bought or done lately that has been worth my money?  Are there any mis­takes I’m mak­ing over and over again?  The next time I’m shop­ping, I’m going ask myself some tough ques­tions.  Maybe I can raise my money-spent to money’s-worth ratio.

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