The extreme reverse of this will happen if you ever get married.Originally Posted by FatalityPitt
Almost all of your pay will go to your spouse for necessities and you get to keep the scraps.But I keep saving those scraps and after some time it becomes a sizable pile of scraps that I can use to spend on toys without affecting the family budget.
Kinda like being a monetary Womble.
Indeed. I've spent over a grand this year on toys and that was almost all at below RRP. I've only spent above RRP on one purchase which was MP Dirge (cos I got sick of waiting for a certain retailer). One reason why I try to stick to my "Not Above RRP" rule is because collecting Transformers is bloody expensive enough as it is at/below RRP!
IMO this is the difference between being a toy collector and being a toy-hoarder.
e.g. Leader Class TLK Megatron looks like a really nice toy. But the truth is that I'm perfectly content with my Voyager figure that I enjoy playing with. The only reason that I'd get the Leader Class figure would be just to say that I have it, so... I just don't buy it. Same with toys like Titans Return Megatron, Optimus Prime (triple changer), Octone, Blitzwing, Astrotrain, Alpha Trion etc. - toys that don't personally interest me, so I skip them.
I did personally enter a Toy-Hoarder stage during the middle Unicron Trilogy era when I started buying almost everything including all the stupid repaints. It was at this stage that I basically slapped myself and asked, "What the hell are you doing?!?" as I realised that, yeah, I was buying toys just for the sake of having them over the sake of actually wanting or enjoying them. The act of buying those figures had overridden the act of playing with them.
And I think this is where the "Plastic Crack" term comes in. It's basically a form of specialised shopping addiction. Acquiring or purchasing the toy makes you feel good so you become addicted to that act, but after you buy the toy you experience a low and you don't even enjoy the toy that you've just bought. I realised just how ridiculously stupid this was, so yeah, now I just focus on buying what I actually want. People can tell me how awesome Leader TLK Megatron is, and I won't deny it. It's just not something I want to buy. It's okay to not want to buy something!
P.S.: I sometimes wonder when I see people who sell off loads of fairly recent toys (especially entire collections of recent lines like Combiner Wars)... was this all just one big series of impulse purchases?Cos to me, if I really like a toy, then I don't ever want to be rid of it. If I don't want to keep a toy forever then I just don't buy it. Hence why I rarely sell stuff. Most of what I sell is either because another toy has come along that's made it redundant or because I have a spare. With redundant toys it's because the toy was perfectly fine at the time of purchase, but later on something better's come along but I don't want to keep both.
e.g. I'm waiting for my Siege of Cybertron set to come in, so I'll be looking to offload my Titans Return Powermaster Optimus Prime toy after that. Now of course, when I purchased TR PMOP last year I had no idea that TakaraTOMY would retool it as Ginrai, or that Hasbro would then release it as Optimus Prime. I'm not clairvoyant.
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