If you’ve bought enough electronics, you’ll soon realize that buying them is a major losing proposition. By the time you have used it a few years, the value of these items drops to near zero. If you try selling them, you will likely get pennies on the dollar. With that in mind, it is very important to carefully select the electronics that you do buy in order to preserve your NetWorth going forward.
How’s it going everybody this is beat the bush electronics in general depreciates really really fast so some of you have asked me when you should actually buy these electronic items quite simply for me i buy the oldest that i can stand sometimes i might have to buy the current model sometimes i might buy a couple versions old i used to buy all the latest tech gadgets
But now i’ve kind of scaled back a little bit and i don’t buy everything right when it comes out the turning point for me was when i go back and reflect upon all the things that i bought i realized that i spent a lot of money on those things and whenever i try to go and sell them or whenever i look at the value of them it just kind of depreciates like a rock i can
Barely get ten percent out of these electronic items if i sell it many many years later and most of time they get so old that no one even wants these items anymore so they just go in some sort of electronic graveyard and i have a whole bucket of these things like you know old cell phones mp3 players and things like that sometimes you have to buy electronic items
Because you absolutely think it’s essential for example this camera that i’m recording these videos on i essentially have to buy these things i have to buy this mic you might think that this is an unnecessary upgrade to me it’s absolutely necessary these lights that i’m using for this video even though yes these are electronic items and yes they will depreciate
Like a rock certain things depreciate less generally things that do not get upgraded every single year depreciate less now the whole point of this exercise is for me to show you some of the items that i bought that i know depreciated a lot so that you can reflect on these items as well yourself so whenever you buy something that similar just know that yeah that
Amount that you sink into it is essentially being burnt you know it it just kind of evaporates and whenever i buy stuff these days i just go okay yeah i’m gonna buy this i know that’s the amount that’s gonna go into it maybe i’m gonna use it for forever so then i don’t really care that it depreciates to zero because the value is there for me now let me give you an
Example i bought one of the earlier macbook airs for $1,800 many many years later now it’s worth only maybe $200 or less and i probably cannot even sell it even if i wanted to i bought an ipad for about $700 brand new and it hurts it pains me to see that just a couple years later i think it’s only three four years that if i sell this item and i did sell it i don’t
Have this ipad anymore because i find out i don’t really use it i’m like okay even if it’s $150 i want to get rid of it because i never touched that thing so i got $150 out of the $700 i spent on it essentially a $550 loss here so basically out of all these mac items if you hold it for five six years you’re gonna you’re looking at a really really large depreciation
Maybe like i don’t know 80% of it it’s gonna depreciate away generally for apple products it’s not gonna depreciate at a rate that’s as fast as other items however if given long enough time it is going to depreciate by a large amount desktop computers i know i bought a handful of them before and each generation i buy one it cost me like $1000 or more and now you know
These days they just sit around until they’re valued at zero dollars basically so when you buy desktop computers be very very wary you want to hold off as long as you can these days you don’t have to buy that many desktop computers because generally they are powerful enough to do what you need if you’re just doing word processing web surfing you don’t really need
That powerful a computer however when i’m editing these videos to edit 1080p video at a reasonable amount of time you need a pretty beefy computer and on top of that if i were to ever edit you know 4k videos i probably need something even more powerful than that digital cameras these point-and-shoot cameras i basically use them until they’re dead so then i do not
Feel the depreciation as much because i get a really good amount of usage out of them however i’ve noticed that generally the newer type of point-and-shoot cameras are more generic they break easier so they give you a good utility and if you use it for a couple of years i feel that the depreciation does not hurt as much because you are using it quite a few amount
Of times this is in comparison in contrast to an ipad where it’s something that just sat there and i didn’t use all that much it’s sort of like people aren’t buying as many ipads these days they don’t they find that they don’t need to use them as much personally i use them it was a fad in the beginning and you realize this with a lot of electronics products they
Are a fad kind of because just take a look at vr people spend thousands and thousands of dollars they upgrade their computer a couple thousand dollars the vr gear itself might be 500 to 1000 dollars for that setup so by the time you’re done with everything it’s three four thousand dollars i just read an article how they’re not selling enough vr stuff and they’re
Lowering the prices the mainstream is not really picking up on vr these days but you know this is an opinion piece so you know i’m not saying vr is dead but you know someone is saying is dead that’s all inkjet printers i used to buy these things for a hundred two hundred dollar a pop i would use them until well one time i broke one by dropping it so out of these items
And many many more i see my hard-earned money put into electronic products and after i see how much is worth later on i just get sick of it i’m like every single time i buy something like this it’s not worth anything anymore i wish i could have you know when i don’t need it anymore i can sell it for at least 50% 80% of the value so knowing that things depreciate
Like a rock knowing which kind of things depreciate like a rock then you can make a conscious decision make an informed decision when you buy the product that yes when i buy into this product it’s not gonna be worth all that much later on then this would weigh in on how much you would actually spend on this product for example i know i don’t want to spend all
That much on iphone so i still have an iphone 5 i bought that thing for like five hundred dollars and i think it’s not worth all that much these days anymore but if i want to upgrade i have to pay one thousand dollars for you know the next one iphone eight or something yes it will have a certain utility because it’ll have a better camera whatever bigger screen and
Stuff however whatever i’m doing with my current phone right now it serves its purpose i can surf the web i can get various emails just everything all the apps i need to run i’m able to do that i’m able to get information i’m able to use the gps so functionality is there however it’s not of the most premium type of functionality when i operate on a generation or
Two or three later you are essentially spending at a lower rate if you are always on the cutting edge it means that your burn rate here the amount that you’re burning it’s kind of like the depreciation you’re taking the grunt of the first year of depreciation if you operate on the cutting edge all the time for every single gadget that you buy you’re going to burn
Through a lot of money so if you step back a little bit just you know one generation even or two generation like i am with the iphone 5 then you’ll find out that you’re getting almost equivalent amount of information or utility out of this however you’re spending a lot less so whenever you get a brand new item if you just step back from the bleeding edge just a
Little bit if this is your habit you’re going to save a lot over your lifetime basically yeah you’re not going to get the latest and greatest that you can show everybody you’re still going to get the equivalent amount of utility though if you’re always on the bleeding edge you’ll also realize that whenever you get something brand new it doesn’t last very long the
Upgrade cycles is usually one year for most products there are some products that the upgrade cycle is more than one year for example this camera that you’re looking through here it’s a canyon 5d mark 3 well they have the 5-3 mark for now however generally on slr dslrs the value of these things keep quite well the lenses keep even better because they don’t upgrade
The lenses it’s just a piece of glass so when a brand-new version of the dslr portion of it where the chip is you can just take your old lens and just stick it on the brand new body so whenever it’s something that does not get upgraded something that does not have a chip inside for example this mic right here i’m pretty sure that you know five years down the line
I might be able to sell this for at least i don’t know half the price that i paid for this thing because it’s one of these timeless things where a mic is a mic it’s not going to evolve unless somehow you know people just start moving on to using you know some sort of other recording mechanism i bought an s and is somewhere over there back in the wall a while ago
And i thought oh if i buy this ness it’s gonna last me at least several years but turns out one year later the ness 2.0 came out and made my ness 1.0 obsolete this is an annoying factor that i did not take into account a lot of times when you buy something just remind yourself that yeah they’re going to come out with a new one and you can easily go online sometimes
And and they would tell you people would kind of know when the upgrade cycle is gonna be so you might not want to catch yourself in buying an item that’s just couple months before an upgrade cycle so let me review the timeless items such as paper shredders generally do not have upgrade cycles when you buy a paper shredder it’s an electronic item there’s a motor
In it five years later your paper shredder is not going to be outdated digital scales for the kitchen is the same thing however you have these brand-new digital scales that are $100 plus that has bluetooth connectivity so in a way i don’t think that really makes your old digital scale all that much obsolete one last thing to know is that some items if you hold it
For a really really long time 20 years 30 years maybe if it’s unopened it’s all that much more valuable you can sell it for a lot of money but it’s hard to know beforehand what those items are sometimes people get lucky they’re like oh you know the first iphone i’m just gonna buy it and not opening i mean for an iphone 8 for example let’s say it’s gonna be $1000
You buy this are you really gonna buy an extra one and just you know not open it and and put it in the attic for 20 years most people won’t do this kind of stuff so i hope this opens up your eyes a little bit in terms of when you should buy electronics just kind of be very aware of the depreciation because i think most people whenever you step into a best buy any
Place that has a lot of electronic gadgets you just buy it just they just look at what’s in their pocket how much is in their checking account and they go oh i can afford this oh let me buy it but you should look at how much it depreciates because this really affects your bottom line because if you’re gonna get rid of it later on it’s the delta between these two
That’s how much you spent on this item and the less that you spend on the delta the less it depreciates your net worth that’s all i have for you for today don’t forget to give me a like on this video comment down below let me know what gadgets you actively avoid in order to avoid depreciation if you’re interested in supporting this channel don’t forget to check
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Transcribed from video
How to Buy Electronics if it Depreciates Like a Rock By BeatTheBush
