HopeFul Reflections

I’d say I’m not very materialistic, but I will spend a few hours looking at the latest gadget that I totally don’t need just because its shiny enough to catch my eye. Now the real trouble is that I have finally for once in my life have the money to buy these fancy gadgets and fill my home with them. Luckily I do not and I feel I’ve struck a perfect balance between buying necessary things/things that make me happy without buying things that waste my money and thereby force me to be a slave to money. Let’s have an example.

I just recently spent money on a brand new laptop. Believe me I was eyeing a few for a long time and if there was a review video out about a laptop, I watched it. Now what factors did I consider.

1. Actual need

I did indeed need a new laptop that was going to be used for work to study medical imaging as I work as a radiology resident. Now to that end I needed to further define what my needs were since I could of course look at laptops that cost a couple grand and waste all my money on features I don’t need. For example, there are laptops out there with tons and tons of storage and RAM and graphics cards and all types of tantalizing upgrades that you can get lost reading about. Let’s be real though, I’m a doctor, I just need to be able to see practice cases on my screen, so I did need a good screen, I need a long battery life because I can be at the hospital for many many hours, and I’d like to not have to upgrade for a while so having high enough specs to future proof the computer would be nice.

2. Budget

I’d love to tell you that as a doctor I have a ton of money like the ones on Tv, but that’s not true. I am a resident doctor and most resident doctors in the country make between $60-70k with lots of it going to paying back debt and living expenses. Now I’ll do another post going into how I break down my finances, but for now let’s focus here and imagine I have maybe $1.5k total set aside for this laptop. How I got to that number will be explained in another post. I’ll just make clear that I will absolutely try not to spend all of it. I just wanted an upper limit so I don’t endlessly add on features and raise the price. you need to tell yourself your limit or there is no limit to how much you’ll spend.

3. Savings, savings, savings

I wanna be smart with my money so I look for discounts offered by my employer and I tacked these on to back to school discounts that companies often give out to entice parents to buy their kids laptops that can take giraffes to the moon just so they can scroll through email and use Microsoft word. So my stacking the back to school sale and my employer discount allowed me to find a computer for $500 less than its normal retail price. Now the trick is finding my fit. Did I need the highest end processor? Nope, deleted. Did I need a crazy graphics card that will drain my battery when I don’t make videos or play video games? Nope, deleted. Do I need to have a really really good screen so I can feel every pixel? honestly, I argued and won on this one since a couple pixels for me at work is the difference between seeing a finding that represents a potential tumor and a completely normal study. Of course I use a much higher quality computer at work, but when I study at home I wanted to have really good views of my study material so even if I get a really grainy image in real life I can remember what the normal is supposed to look like. So yeah I decided to shell out a few extra bucks, cause for my purposes I actually would use it.

Overall my process was that I determined if I really needed the object, I defined my budget and how much I really had set aside for spending, and I made sure to only get what I needed and ignored the sales tactics to make me buy the latest and greatest Rocketship as a laptop.