Mr. Penny Pincher: Learning the Difference Between Price and Value

I recently received a tax bill for my car. Although this is usually an anxious moment, I figured the bill would be fairly small given the value and age of my daily commuter. Fairly small doesn’t begin to describe my surprise at the total amount due. Never in my life could I have guessed that I would owe $29 in taxes for anything and yet, that miniscule amount was staring back at me in bold print. 

For the price of a date night at Panera (perhaps even less), I’m able to keep the South Carolina government off my back for another year. It doesn’t seem possible, something is actually cheaper than I would’ve expected. How did we get here? 

I’ve written about this before but my car is over 16 years old. I bought it new off the showroom floor, opting for the Sport version with the V6 engine and, as gas was pretty cheap at the time, worse gas mileage than the 4 cylinder. All these years later, it has over 147K miles on it and, according to anyone who sells cars for a living, is worth the price of admission to the next Taylor Swift concert.

Nowhere near the stage by the way, you’d be sitting in the nosebleeds. 

That’s the value to anyone else. The value of the car to me is worth much, much more. Not only are the taxes low, I still have a love for a car I purchased long ago and was able to pay off through a rough financial patch in my life. Years of memories and life events are hidden within the pleather seats. Plus, the fact of the matter is, the car starts when I turn the key and gets me where I need to go. Reliability, relative comfort and family car sportiness have kept me happy all these years later. 

Value is an interesting concept. A person curled up under a blanket in their basement watching a big screen TV may also be scrolling Amazon, hoping to find a new and more stylish blanket. The item that’s keeping them warm is no longer satisfactory, they see less value in it than they did when they bought it. That same blanket to a person in poverty could be the difference between a restless night of chattering teeth or one of warmth and restful sleep. The value to one person is very different from the value held by another. 

Years ago, when my wife and I had more expendable income, I hired a plumber to fix the toilet in one of our bathrooms. Truth be told, between toilets and fire detectors, I’ve spent a fortune properly disposing of waste and ensuring our house doesn’t burn down, but I digress. The plumber fixed our toilet by replacing the valve stem, a part I later realized cost around $30 at the hardware store. He charged me $350. 

As is often the case, I was paying more for the convenience and his knowledge of how to fix it. I accepted this at the time due to other work priorities and a general lack of time or care to research the problem on my own. There was value for me in having to avoid fixing it myself. Now that Chat GPT and You Tube are more prevalent, I see less value in this approach. 

A recent fix of the same valve stem cost me around $25 and less than :30 minutes of my time. It was more valuable for me to do it myself rather than having someone else charge an exorbitant fee for knowledge I can attain fairly quickly on my own. 

The value of anything isn’t always measured in dollars and cents. Time, effort and sentimentality among others also play a role in what’s valuable to you versus someone else.

In the end, the true value of something isn’t what someone else is willing to pay for it, but what it means to you.