nuhobby wrote:When I went to the Dayton get-together for Shopsmith owners in 2008, the visitors ran the gamut. One guy was styling in a sleek Audi that he drove. Others were driving beater trucks. I got the impression that all of the folks knew how to manage their money, but some admitted to having tool-buying addictions.
Chris
I don't have a lot of really close friends anymore... I did but far too many of them have died off in recent years along with many of my old class of 1960 high school classmates. A group of us that are local get together every month (on my initiative) but in the last two years we are fewer.
One of the friends I still have and I are not real close but we do bump into each other now and then and we just pick up talking where we left off. We are at different levels of affluence...
He is a multi-millionaire many times over. Me, I get along OK but he is worth maybe 10 or 15 times what I am. Maybe much more. We happen to share a hobby, old Gravely garden tractors... When we get together the conversation always soon turns to our common hobby. At that point we are pretty much equal. He is as common as an old shoe and can pinch a penny until old Abe screams in pain.
At least around here locally we both drive old, tired pickup trucks and some years ago it seemed like we were in a contest to see which truck would rust completely out of existence first.
He won. I was driving an old 1977 GMC with Rust-a-matic and he was driving on old small Japanese pickup that I believe used to be white. If he wanted to put something small in the bed he had to put it in something else to keep it from falling through the rust holes.
He is the most affluent person I know personally but I can guarantee you that there are none of those things listed in those responses in his old brick farm house. I'm afraid that if I ever tried to talk him into buying a new Shopsmith and told him the price he might just have a stroke...
One funny thing, he is about my age but he is still working full time... Not me, I can loaf with the best of them.
Most of us chugging along can usually manage to buy things that are important to us but it took me a long time to acquire a Shopsmith. I wished for one for 28 years first then bought my 510 new in 1988. Including a few small extras the total was right at $2,300 give or take. Back then I had no idea how many were available used at a reasonable price. If I had known I would have bought one (or more) used about 20 years sooner.
My woodshop is the one thing that still owes me. My farm / mechanics shop has always been a producer. Either I made money directly from it or I saved myself from spending large sums of money
by doing things very cheaply that someone else would have charged me an arm and a leg to do for me. That is especially true of large repairs or rebuilds on all manner of farm equipment. It also includes maintenance and repairs on cars, trucks etc.
The wood shop has given me a lot of satisfaction but little direct income. It has been profitable if I consider my use of parts of it for building repairs and rehabs on rentals over the years but that is a bit shaky since carpentry and most other rehab work is almost another whole area and includes all building trades. My life has a lot of blurry lines in it.
We went 25 years without taking a vacation except for Sunday drives or an occasional overnight stay somewhere within a few hundred miles. I have decided to claim that my woodshop cost are me now taking some of those missed vacations.
I need to walk to the back of the farm now to check on a horse and then get some firewood in but this evening I'll be in the basement dusting off and moving some of my vacations around the shop.
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