Today I read Moses’ blog post on post-purchase dissonance and got to thinking. Post-purchase dissonance hadn’t hit me for many years on certain items till now. The many products and services I have purchased in the past are haunting me now as a cash-strapped student. Who knew at the time of purchase that I would be in this situation years later.
Some things I purchased were for luxury reasons. Many would argue that you don’t need a car at age 16, yet I had one (it was legitimately mine, not my parents’). I had earned that luxury at the time for working hard and saving my money. So I paid insurance on that truck for 1, 2, 3 years and a bit. There goes over 3000 dollars spent on insurance. I probably spent another couple thousand on gas, another thousand for maintenance and I’m at a total of at least 6000 dollars. Mind you, at those times, I did have the opportunity of having a bus pass paid for by my parents, but I chose to forgo that option. That resulted in me driving to school everyday for about a year and a half while I could have taken transit essentially for free.
Then I look at all the video games I have purchased over the years, many of which I played minimally; chalk up several hundred dollars for that. Maybe going to UBC as opposed to staying in Victoria and going to school there where my room and board is free. Then I don’t spend $6000+ on living expenses per year. Also, most of my friends are still in Victoria, so the opportunity to see them more frequently than a few times during the school year is forgone. The list goes on and on.
After all this, I got student loans which the need for would be obsolete with all the savings I could have had. If I could do it all over again, I would. It’s just too bad there is no time travel machine like in “Back to the Future” so that I could do it over. It’s not that I didn’t appreciate the luxuries while I had them, because I did. It’s the fact that I couldn’t afford to have those luxuries if I wanted the luxury of being debt free now. If only I had saved for a little longer.