I pledge to make no purchases unless I can answer TRUE to the following FIVE statements.
1. I have given this purchase sufficient thought.
2. Buying this item will not create debt for me or anyone else.
3. I not only want this item, I need it.
4. This item is more valuable than the interest I'd earn if I saved the money instead.
5. This item will matter to me in a year.
I was not at all familiar with Kevin O'Leary prior to this but since he's a billionaire and I'm not, it just might be worth taking a look at what he has to offer. In this day and age, item number four might not carry much worth since it's nigh on impossible to earn any interest on any investment placed in a deposit account or CD with a bank. Item number five, however, strikes a chord with me. How many things are we going to buy that actually matter a year later and why will they matter. Big ticket items like a house or a car, certainly, and small items such as tools will matter a year later and many years beyond that.
Every time I stop for gas at the local station, the pump asks me to insert my "Perks" card. If you buy enough items inside the station with the card, you'll eventually receive a few cents per gallon discount on your gas. I used to have one before the heart attack. I used it when buying a cup of coffee and a doughnut or a sports drink in the summertime. Since I've quit eating doughnuts and drinking sports drinks, I now have no reason to go inside the gas station at all so I tossed the Perks card. Since I'm now looking at a purchase from a gas station or convenience mart from a health perspective, not buying the item will matter to me in a year. However, next time you're at your local station take a look at the number of people who buy more than gas or don't even buy gas but still make a purchase anyway. Probably 99% of all of these purchases would fail test number three. A pack of smokes or a doughnut is a want not a need regardless of how bad you are Jonesin' for a smoke or a sugar fix.
I've put a list together of big ticket expenditures I'm going to budget for this year. Most of them pass the five point test above but I'd have to use a pretty loose interpretation when it comes to number three for several of them. Grinding fixture for lathe tools? That's a legitimate need even if the lathe might not have been. However, do I really need a $370 seat for a 40 year old motorcycle? My old pal Joey B used to use the logic of "Pride of Ownership" to explain away some of his purchases - things like an Uzi and Thompson submachine gun for example.
To me, fixing up an old motorcycle or tinkering around with some of my projects is certainly more than a want. There's a certain intrinsic need beyond the dollar value - Pride of Ownership or Craftsmanship, if you will. Will this item matter to me in a year? If I've been tripping over it for thirty years, it'll probably matter next year as well. I will admit that I'm starting to look at the pile and see it less as what it could be and more as what it actually is: a collection of items that are about two days away from being junk and that are going to require an enormous amount of time, labor and money. Probably should have read the list before I drug them all home.
Since it's essentially too late to turn back now, however, and it's too damn cold to do much more than just huddle around the fireplace, I've been thinking about one of the items that actually satisfies all five of the above requirements, that being the BSA that my late brother left to Surly and me. Brother Johnny talked to me about making some sidecovers for him but only in the general sense. We never got around to any specifics, but from what I've gleaned from his old blog and the fact that I was around the dude for 58 years, I think I've got a general sense of what he was looking for. What I need now is to finalize the design or something close to it and make a prototype or if I feel I'm where I want to be with it, make a hammerform and get to gettin'. I can run it by Surly and if we agree, proceed. Like me, he's currently waiting out the weather dreaming about motorcycles in general but rather than sidecovers, it's Sportster pipes in particular.
Filling the space there won't be hard, just need to come up with something sexy to match the new tank John had bought. It'd be nice if I had an air cleaner to stick on there while thinking about this.
There's supposed to be a brief respite from the cold weather this weekend - see if I can't do something, even if it is wrong.
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