About 6 years ago, I went on a pretty serious exercise regimen, and felt that if I had a stationary exercise bike I’d get great use out of it, so naturally I went off to a large box Exercise Store, and bought one of the dumber wastes of money in my life, a $1000 exercise bike.
This baby was all-singing all-dancing, programmable, with magnetic thingies and other stuff (the only thing it didn’t do was make me sit on it and force me to exercise, which would have been the best idea).
I did use it for a while, stopped, and then when I went back to it, it was broken. It started working again after a while and then finally died completely (naturally completely out of the warranty period). Here I sat with $1000 worth of useless exercise equipment (that I had to throw out), and a middle-aged paunch.
My frustration with myself is that I got “sold” something that I knew I didn’t need (a ludicrously expensive exercise bike) when all I needed was a generic bike.
The Expensive Bike looked like this (I think)
The best part of the story is that 2 years ago I finally decided to get another stationary exercise bike, found it on Kajiji, bought it for $100 and it does more than the $1000 carbuncle that I bought so long ago. I had to drive to hell and gone to get this replacement bike, but I got what I needed and it still works today.
Unfortunately I still have the middle-aged paunch, but I am working on it (for those who don’t recognize that is a reference to Middle Aged Man, from Saturday Night Live).
I realize that most folks are not too proud of their dumb purchases, but can I ask my readers, what is the most expensive dumb thing that you bought? I am curious to know what folks will admit to, and how much money might be spent on one of these (I feel stupid enough blowing $1000), how big was yours?
My story is very similar to yours, but lucky for me the cost was much less. For some strange reason we had The Shopping Channel on one day a while back and I saw the program for The Gazelle. I do not think we used it more than 50 times all together. Needless to say we now use it to hang up laundry in the basement. It does a good job of that though.
I have bought things on sale because I thought I wanted it. I wear it once or twice and never wear it again. Either it does not fit that well or I didn’t really like it. Luckily,the individual price was under $100.
Very good self-control, if all you blew was $100…
I could list a few, but for some reason I buy expensive drinking glasses. A set of two glass coffee mugs for $25 that apparently keep your coffee warmer than normal mugs, and $80 beer glass, eight wine glasses for $100…and guess what…they all broke.
I agree with the last post, stocks. In university I had three friends working as day traders making a killing (late nineties) and they convinced me to put $15,000 US from my STUDENT LOAN into tech stocks…you know how that ended. All gone. Thankfully I paid my loan back quickly since I had a great job out of school, but I’ll never forget that “learning” experience.
Man, I am impressed by the honesty of you folks so far, this is an amazing set of stories (so far)!
My stupidest purchase would have to be a stock, not an exercise bike. I almost entirely avoid individual stocks but I did stupidly buy yellow pages. We all know what happened there. Lost a fair bit more than your $1000. Didn’t break the bank or anything but it wasn’t fun.
I also purchased a recumbent exercise bike recently new from Costco for about $500. It was good value compared to what else was around and I know that if it ever completely fails in a reasonable period of time I can just dump it off at Costco’s door” and they’ll give me a full refund like I’ve done many times before.