I was just looking around the clutter on my desk, and i saw an item that i bought back in 2002, that works just as well as it did when new, and yet has a monetary value (based on replacement cost) that is a tiny fraction of what i paid.
It is a Compact Flash card for a digital camera. I purchased it at the same time that i bought my first digital camera. The card was one of the top-of-the-line models, a 512Mb Lexar Professional 24X CF Card with Write Acceleration.
The cost?
$329.95 (i still have the receipt)
!!!
They don’t even seem to make 512Mb cards anymore, but you can now quite easily find a 1Gb card for under $10.
So, what item of your has depreciated the most? I’m most interested in items that still work as they were intended. I don’t care so much about stuff that it broken on otherwise non-functional.
Well, I’d say my car, but that isn’t exactly as good as new. Still, it rolls and has depreciated well over $20K over the past 13+ years.
I have any number of digital cameras and computers that work as well as the day they came out of the box but that have little or no resale value. I could probably get a couple of hundred bucks for my old Canon body on Craigslist, so that’s probably depreciated $1000 or so.
In aggregate, I’ve probably tossed 10K worth of perfectly good computer equipment to the curb over the years.
Take your appraisal to the assessor’s office, and ask for your property to be reassessed. We refininced in January, and the appraisal showed a 23% drop in value. I took the appraisal to the assessor, they lowered the assessed value of our house to that of the appraisal, and our property taxes went down accordingly.
RAM bought back in 1993.
It was just after a fire in a factory that made over half of the world’s epoxy resin.
I think we paid close to $600. Yes, $600 for 8 MEG of RAM.
Now I wouldn’t know where to look for a stick of memory that small, and I can get 1G for about $25.
So either there is total devaluation, or if I take the $25/G current cost, my 8M would be worth about $0.20.
Apart from computer gear, I still have an .mp3 CD player I paid ~$275 for c. 2000.
Somehow I doubt it would fetch very much in a market where you can fit sixteen times as much storage into a package 1/50th of its size without leaving the “economy” category.
The appraised value for refinancing is based on the number of home sales (including foreclosures) of similar houses in the area. The county tax assessors are not allowed to look at ANY foreclosures - so they base the taxes on the houses that sold in a conventional manner - even though the last of those were several years ago.
My first PC, a no-name XT clone. Bought for >$1000. Nostalgic garbage now (and has been for a very long time). Some of it has in fact gone bye-bye, the rest real soon. The old monitor for it would actually have negative value in some locales as disposal would require paying a fee. I have hundreds of similar computer and electronic items that are also being junked. But most was bought used so no great depreciation. This was the only computer bought as a unit new, so it stands out.
All this talk of ipods and mp3 players makes me glad that I resisted my impulse to buy one back in 2004, when everyone I knew in my peer group (18-24) was dropping $400-500 dollars for the “must-have” gadget. I remember thinking to myself, I could probably buy one a year from now for $20. I ended up getting one for $75, and got my money’s worth out of it until it died this year after 3 years of faithful service. I just got a new mp3 player for about $25.
This is true, and i have a relatively cheap mp3 player i bought a few years ago to listen to while running.
But…
There are mp3 players, and mp3 players. Sure, you can get something perfectly serviceable for 30 bucks these days, but it’s not going to have the same sort of capacity, functionality, and bells and whistles of a more expensive model. An iPod touch, for example, is still in the $200-400 range, depending on capacity. The Zune is in a similar price bracket.
It was, of course, fairly predictable that electronic equipment would be the most frequently mentioned type of product in a thread like this. Even if it continues to work perfectly, the simple march of technological development often renders it obsolete.
By contrast, many other items maintain their value comparatively well.
My wife and i bought a couch last year. It’s about 40 years old, and is (according to the missus, who knows about such things) a very well-respected brand of American-made furniture. If i could be bothered going downstairs and pulling up the cushions, i could find out the name. Anyway, it was owned by an elderly couple and apparently sat in their rarely-used “good” living room for most of its life. It’s in perfect condition, both cosmetically and in terms of support and comfort.
We paid about $400 for it. Sure, when you take inflation into account, that’s probably less than it cost new, but the value still held up pretty well over four decades. It’s about as old as i am, but looks a lot newer.
