I am an avid board gamer. (No, not Monopoly or LIFE. I play the Euro-style games you find in hobby shops or even on a separate shelf at Target these days.) Anyway, as part of my immersion in the hobby, I spend a lot of time on BoardGameGeek.com. It’s a community/resource for gamers where you can keep track of 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 approximate dollar value of your collection. The 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 eye-opening. I’m not in the market to sell any games, so the value doesn’t matter to me from that standpoint. I was more curious about what my collection is currently worth compared to the original purchase price. Let’s say the current value is less than the original purchase price without giving exact numbers. Substantially so, to the point that the difference is shocking.
If I had to liquidate everything today, I wouldn’t come close to recouping what I paid. (And that’s okay because I don’t buy games to sell them. I buy them to play.) However, this little experiment shows that people often overestimate the value of their stuff. I certainly did. The gap between the current value and the original cost should be closer, if not inverted. After all, I have a lot of games that are rare or out of print. Shouldn’t that count for more?
Nope. It might be if I found a collector specifically interested in that game, but on the general resale market, most games are worth peanuts. And that’s true for just about every bit of stuff we buy. (Beanie Babies, anyone?) There are very few things that end up being worth more than you paid. Anything that does end up worth something usually takes many years to get there and you’ll be dead before it does. Yet over and over, we make the mistake of overestimating the value of our stuff. It’s why you see someone at a yard sale unable to move their items. They want too much, and the market won’t bear it.
Generally, this equation isn’t much of a problem. We buy stuff to use or enjoy, and that has a worth of its own outside of the object. A game tool might tell me that a certain game is worth $5, but I know I’ve gotten many hours of fun and social time out of that game. Likely even more than the original purchase price. That renders the current “value” irrelevant. By the time I’m ready to get rid of the game, no amount of money will come close to the value I received from the game in terms of fun.
However, there are exceptions where a game is just a dud out of the box. I play it several times, and it’s not resonating with me. In those cases, the resale value becomes more important. I want to get rid of it, but I know I can’t come close to that original purchase price. It’s a loss from all sides. I paid money, I didn’t receive much enjoyment, and I can’t get much cash back out of it. Those are the ouch moments. As much as they hurt, I usually learn something from them. I learn which games don’t appeal to me and avoid them in the future. The ouch moments end up saving me money in the long run if I learn from them.
It would be nice to have a tool that could inventory our entire lives like this. We need a tool to determine the true value of our stuff and experiences and help us learn from the ouches. If you paid $10,000 for a trip to Tahiti, did you get $10,000 worth of enjoyment or life experience out of that trip, or was it “worth” substantially less? Was that restaurant meal really “worth” $50 in terms of quality and enjoyment, or was it worth far less? Did you get $50,000 worth of enjoyment out of that new car you kept for three years?
Doing an autopsy on all of our experiences and stuff would likely teach us the true “value” of the things we spend our money on. We’d likely see that we vastly overestimate just about everything in our lives. We don’t get the enjoyment or utility out of things that we think we do. We spend a boatload and get very little back. Sure, some things come up winners. That trip may have been great, or that piece of furniture was outstanding. But most of our stuff sits in closets unused, or we use it a few times and dump it, or we find out too late that we just don’t enjoy x, y, or z.
If we could run this tool on everything in life, eventually (I hope), we’d start to make smarter decisions about money. We’d realize that so much of what we buy and spend on isn’t worth it, either now or in the long run. In the absence of such a tool, I can only suggest that you mentally inventory your stuff and autopsy your spending. Do you have a ton of stuff lying around that you think is worth something? Go find out exactly how much it’s worth, and you’ll probably stop buying more of it. Ask yourself if you’re getting utility or enjoyment out of your stuff that’s at least equivalent to what you paid.
Yes, all of this is subjective and unique to you. But if you think about the value of your stuff, you’ll likely change your relationship with stuff, money, and spending in general. You may find that you no longer want to spend on things you thought were worth it because they’re just not. And in the end, you may decide that some of the most “valuable” things aren’t things at all. They’re dollars in the bank to help pay for your future.
Read More:
- Stuff is Almost Never a Good Investment
- Your Stuff is Just Stuff
- Why You Shouldn’t Trade In Your Stuff
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