This is why I don’t buy things
After months of looking, I finally decided to go get a new car deck for Big Red (my car). I got a 10% coupon, a rewards card that will give me back $5 for every $100 I spend, and I will put it on my discover card which will give me back 1% of what I spend. There’s free installation on the system too. Yea, I'm a bit ridiculous like that.
All is aligned. No more excuses.

I head over to the big yellow and blue store (I don’t like them, but they’re the only thing out here in this stoopid non-real city I live in). I’ve been looking for months and months so I knew exactly what I wanted. I was thinking of getting a deck in the mid to high $100 at first. Then, because of my obsession with decks that has changing colors and little animations, I had to up my price range to the low $200. All those decks were stupid, so my price range upped again to the mid $200.

I got there this morning and looked around at the same ones I’ve been looking at for months now. As there is NO customer service at this store, I wander around and what do I see? Sitting at the returned table was one of the super fancy car decks that is regularly priced for $399. Then I saw that because it's a return item, it’s only at $289!

So of course, this blows everything out of the water for me. I had to rethink everything. With the 10% coupon, this originally $399 deck would be the same price as the one I was about to get (over $150 in savings). I checked and checked and really didn’t see that much difference between the one I was getting and this one. As a matter of fact, the more expensive one doesn’t seem to have as many choice of animation as the other.

Sadly, I’m a big sucker for a really good deal. Even though it seems to have all the same features, this returned one is a lot more expensive so it must be better right? I hope so.

This is what I ended up getting.

So I went from my initial mid $100 budget to my final price of around $350 (plus taxes and stuff) for my car deck. I almost did a similar thing where I almost talked myself into a TV that was twice as expensive as the one I was getting. Luckily the different was thousands of dollars instead of hundreds (as in this case) so I didn’t do it.
See why I can't buy big things? At the last moment, I always give in to buying something much nicer than I was going for in the first place.
The deck is very awesome though. It plays every imaginable music format. I'm very excited with the MP3 feature. I can fit 800MB of songs (hundreds) instead of about 20 songs on a regular CD. So more tons of CDs everywhere in my car!

Anyway, if you hear some BOOM in your neighbor this weekend, especially late at night, you’ll know who it is.

Have a good weekend everyone!