I wanted to post this in the mental health thread. But I honestly wanted more takes on it as I find it to be a slightly more focused subject regarding value.
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I will play devil’s advocate on a part of this discussion though.
Buying used in the higher end tiered gear.
In the higher end, the users including myself give great care of the gear and if you know the value of each piece, you can get superb looking and sounding gear for a good price. These pieces seem to hold their value well at this price, so I seemed to lose money much less or break even buying and selling at the higher end than I did at entry level. It was essentially an invested lease, in which I can get my money back in the future if I needed to.
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It does have overlaps but I think it made sense to ask it separately too. I think you are getting more varied and complex answers this way.
Hey Cristian and welcome to the forum 
I think this is a really good point. Whether something is expensive or cheap if it is annoying to use then it doesn’t matter to me how good it is.
I think that is true of all expensive goods. They are better made, last much much longer and retain value much better because of these things and because they remain rarer, no? I’ve always seen that as one of the hidden ways people with more money are able to lower costs more easily than people with less. Cheap stuff wears out! 
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I was going to say, between these two threads we’ve become downright introspective!
A good thing, IMO.
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I’ll agree.
But I’ll play devils advocate to your devils advocate.
Your still tying up money in an asset which is a risk on two fronts, the asset could be damaged/fail, or you may need the liquid funds for an emergency.
My rule on anything I buy is I have to know more or less what I’ll lose on it, how quickly I could move it, and it can’t significantly decrease my liquidity. At that point I don’t worry about it.
I usually have to go up through tiers of pricing justifying each one to myself before jumping to find a place I’m comfortable at.
There was a point where a $1000 DAC seemed insane, but if I were in the market for a turntable I wouldn’t look at anything under $5000 and I’d drop $5000 on a computer I didn’t need without a second thought.
I’d already gone through the process of assigning those values to Turntables and Computers, and was working my way up in DAC’s.
Value is all relative, and largely about perception.
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Imo these are crazy important things to discuss on high end forums. I myself have fallen into the trap of overleveraging myself (for a car, not audio, and it was several years ago now) because my mental state wasn’t where it should have been when playing with (to me) a very significant amount of money. This and the tinnitus thread on headphones.com are some of my favorite audio threads tbh
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So, just to follow up on this thread, I think my perceptions changed faster than I realized they had. I just made a spreadsheet of my gear and it turns out that I am a fair bit deeper than I thought (still all in play budget so no finanatial worries, just commentary on views of gear pricing). Like more in over ears alone than I thought I was in total…
So… I guess this means that while I have paid good attention to (and properly managed) my changing values regarding individual item price, I have apparently not done a great job keeping track of how much money has been tied up within the hobby as a whole. TBH kind of a wake up call for me that maybe I need to start managed my audio stuff as assets in quickin instead of just wholesale tagging audio (and a few other hobby) transactions as “play money” and maybe I haven’t been as healthy about the hobby as I had thought I was being (again, I’m in no finanatial threat, so dont worry, just commentary that I wasn’t actually fully aware of my situation)
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this is something I never want to do for all my hobbies combined
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I keep track of every cent of my car expenditures super granularly (became an issue when I sold a car for a profit in the past and had to show I had spent a ton on work on it), but I dont tend to for my other hobbies. I guess its probably a good idea once you start leaving amounts in singular items that are inconsequential to you.
Keeping track of what you buy and sell and whatnot is good to have, but also something you will grow to hate looking at and want to avoid lol. Have a spreadsheet of audio expenditures and I really don’t like to look in at this point
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rofl, very true. I look at my quikin tab for my 74 beetle (that is still worth the same as what I paid for it when I was 14) and want to die a bit every time.
i definitely don’t want to know how much ive spent on audio at this point, ignorance is bliss 
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Or coffee. I spend $3-5/ day just at freaking Starbucks
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I had a nightmare where I died, and my wife sold all my stereo gear for the price I told her I paid for it.
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It’s funny, I don’t feel the need to hide things, but my girlfriend Ellen knows she has a difficult time wrapping her mind around the prices of stuff, so she kind of goes out of her way /not/ to ask. We had a conversation recently where I was mulling over buying something used and she goes, “you don’t need to tell me what it costs, but what kind of a discount are you looking at?” “I’d be paying a little more than 50% what it is new…” etc etc so she could try to help me decide without knowing exact dollar amounts.
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LOL it was just a cheap joke.
32 years of marriage, the truth is the reason I’ve made it this long. (Plus I’m quite a catch) Thankfully she enjoys listening to music a lot as well!
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My spreadsheet says I’m well under water on my budget. I keep track of things because I should put the money back in that budget before buying something new,
But literally today, my brain came up with “fuck it, maybe I’ll just write it all off and not worry about it. Businesses do it all the time” 
It was a surprising and terrible thought. I honestly believe I’m more disciplined than that. Oh well…will be having some words with myself.
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One of the things I do to limit my impulse buying is I keep a detailed diagram of the audio chain I have. My rule is that if I want to buy a new thing there has to be a space for it or I have to make a space by getting rid of something. For headphones I have a similar rule with the number of spaces on stands and for iems the spaces in my storage case. It works for me as it means I have to stop and think before I buy. Plus I really enjoy playing around with the audio chain diagram and doing so has lead me to things like my diy switch box project.
Everytime I move up in performance tiers I never feel like diminishing returns is taking place and always feel like I’m definitely getting more out of my experience than I was before. All that has taught me is that a quality audio component is likely gonna be worth it at whatever price it takes to upgrade as long as I can comfortably afford it at the moment. I previously set arbitrary caps like not going over 1k per component, or 2k and so on, but I no longer care about that. This is just a really rewarding hobby and I don’t mind paying for that.
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I think it’s all a matter of our perspectives changing as we evolve up the audio line.
That’s why I think it’s EXTREMELY important not to jump into the deep end of audio first, since you really would have no reference points, no idea of what it is that you just bought based on nothing but a sales guys or worse a guy on the internet.