The Upgrade Trap | Episode 600

0:00Hey, it's James from SurvivalPunk.com. Good morning. It is not super chilly this morning. It is 69 degrees. My family is probably going to wake up sweaty because I turned the air conditioner off and I forgot to turn it back on. Today we're going to talk about the upgrade trap. The falling into the trap of upgrading your cell phone every one to two years. Your laptop, your TV, your car. It's going to be, it's going to be about upgrading but it's also going to be a lot of don't be keeping up with the Joneses. My wife could really, really fall into that if I would let her. We're not them. We're not. Before we get to all that though, let's take a storm warning theme music. We need to crash into streets of blaze. Okay, I say every game. It's got four in the world blaze.

1:01We survive in twisted nays. The top rise in time last. I'm covered with foam glass. They cannot be formed. It's so fast. It's so fast. It's so fast. It's so fast. The apocalypse. You're late. But we're fine. You've just asked us games. Why? And we're back. I am finally starting to feel a bit better. I don't know what kind of crud that I got, but it kicked my ass. I can't imagine not giving blood. I can't imagine doing blood work twice in like two days or something is probably super good with whatever. I have not heard anything back from the rheumatologist yet. It has only been like three days. One of the lab work posted. It was something something gold. It was a test for tuberculosis.

2:04Good news. I don't have tuberculosis. Seems like a weird one to rule out, but she seems like she's being pretty damn thorough. So no tuberculosis. I'm not going to be doc holiday. And then yesterday, I went to take blood work for my TRT to see how that's going. I have a feeling my estradiol is slightly out of range, but it could be wrong. Anyway. Also, I lowered my testosterone dose. I started out at 200 milligrams of testosterone a week, administered Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and I'm currently at 150 milligrams a week, one because I, well, I was making some guesses based on my last blood work

3:08that I took while on 200 milligrams a week, my total testosterone was like 1254. Technically, that's above range. It's probably fine, but I'm trying to get to the actual sweet spot between like 900 and 1,000. Well, I was. Currently, I'm doing something else. But I was having a couple side effects. Anyway, they have great trap. Really feel like this one is easy to fall into for a lot of people. And that is upgrading your phone. It's nice to have the newest fanciest phones. And by God, do they pump those fuckers out? There's always a new fancier phone, a new Android flagship,

4:08a new crazy Android. The technology of like the folding phones and stuff is pretty amazing. A new fucking iPhone for you, iPhone people with new fancy features that you probably won't use. And I admit, for a long time, I was maybe on the cusp of this, starting with the first Android phone, T-Mobile G1. I went with T-Mobile to get the first Android phone, which was a weird, like it had a full flip out keyboard, like a physical, quirky keyboard that you could type on. That thing did not last very long. That was a novelty of its time, Nito, but not really practical. And then from there, I did kind of fall into the upgrade trap

5:08for probably several years. And T-Mobile allows you to, a lot of phone companies will let you upgrade. T-Mobile lets you upgrade, but they just make your bill more expensive for years. That's there. That's their got you, annoyingly. You know, and I would do that. The $20 or $30 is more expensive, and I've been locked into the contract for years. Obviously, I'm still with T-Mobile. They're all about the same. I don't really see a point in changing, to be honest. But, much like the episode we just did on subscriptions, if you're doing that every few years, if your bill is perpetually, at least $30 is more expensive, for that, it's a subscription. And that's just for one device, right? You upgrade your whole family, you know, you're tacking on like $100 extra dollars,

6:09just to have new devices that never ends. There are a couple better solutions. I'm sure all the companies do this. T-Mobile does this. And that's, if you wait and you plan it, and you save up like the taxes and whatnot, there will be upgrade deals, where you can get the device for free, via promotional credits. So, I want to say my wife's last device was like that, and her watch. I just had to pay a little bit down, like $125 down on her Galaxy watch, and it was like whatever the $10 a month or whatever it was was, for adding the line, we got the watch for free, we still didn't have to pay for the line though, for the duration of that deal. So, they got us with that,

7:11but there's often deals where it's like, upgrade your device, and you'll get credits. So, it's like $30 a month, they'll give you $30 in credits. The deals I see now though are not that much. It's like, upgrade your device for $30 a month, and we'll give you $15 a month in credits, so you get it for $15 a month. I'm not real, I'm not real keen on that one, like that's, I'm gonna not take that deal. I'll sit on it until they come out with a better deal. The thing that I do though, is, one, I no longer bother paying for insurance on my phone, or my son's phone. My wife's phone, we do keep insurance on, because she is destructive. She will break phones left and right. Mine, I did the, and I was pissed at the insurance people,

8:11the insurance people, they pissed me the fuck off, and I dropped my insurance, which was, um, easily like, $18 or more a month, for the insurance, and I just didn't really feel like it was worth it. When my device breaks, I go to eBay, I find a model a couple of years old, for one to $200, and I buy that. And depending on the condition of my old device, I list that on eBay, and I sell it, and recoup some of my price, even in, even in like a damaged state, you can get, a good deal of money from eBay, from your old device. Um, my last one, I haven't sold, mostly because I can't get it to turn on, to wipe it. Um, it was working,

9:11and then, it stopped working, and I might try again to get it to power on and wipe it. Uh, but even with, with a crack screen and stuff, um, you can absolutely just sell those. People will, people will do screen replacements, and resell it, and that's generally what you're buying. You're bought, people are buying broke phones for a good deal, and they're reselling them after they repair them, for, for more. It's a good flip, if you can do it. That, I feel, is a way better option. You're not, think about it. If you set the money aside for insurance, right? You take 20 bucks a month, that's $200 a year. That's a, that's a new phone, be a eBay, every year. Um, or, if you don't, if you sit on it, you have that money set aside for, you smash your screen,

10:11you need a replacement, there you go. Then you sell the old one for like 60 bucks, or so on eBay, because it has a smash screen. That is absolutely the way to go. Um, and you won't be getting the newest, greatest models, but you don't really need it, right? Um, and if you do, you can wait, you can wait until you can snatch up one of those deals, right? If you're doing what I'm saying, you're, you're saving like $20 a month, and they have a deal, like you got to pay tax and, and whatever. So like 150 bucks or something, and you get like, credits to pay for the device, boom, just jump on that. Don't, don't just, willy-nilly go upgrade your device, and have a $30 extra, bill for no reason. Every other company of every other product is trying to get you to do the same thing. We talk about planned obsolescence, and we're not going to really dig into that.

11:14I know Microsoft pissed off a lot of people with ending support for basically everything out there. There wasn't the newest devices. Um, I get that notification fairly often, and I'm like, nope, nope, screw you, Microsoft. Um, I want to say, I already know what number it is, my desktop isn't even that old, and they've turned off support. Um, I think they're trying to reverse some of that, because the internet backlash is pretty fucking harsh. Also, I feel like, laptop planned obsolescence is very, very brutal. IE, in the past, I would generally go by, 300 on a laptop, and I would use it until, for various reasons, it'll just stop working. Right? Um, hard drive failure,

12:17um, parts on it break, just operating system rot, for whatever reason, they just kind of go bad, after a while. And for years, three like, two or three years, I just go buy a new laptop. I haven't done it in many years now. My laptop broke. At some point when my daughter was very young, after it being dropped several times, and me trying to fix it, and it just eventually just was done. It was just done. Um, after that, I got the desktop, and that's what I'm still using. And it's not great. It's really not great. And I do need a new laptop, for about a million reasons, uh, just being mobile with it. And, um, I need a new laptop.

13:18I'm kind of starting to look around. Um, I know my last laptop, I bought only with a laptop from SurvivalPunk, which is pretty awesome. My next laptop will probably be bought only with income from, uh, my peptides, money that I make, uh, which is really doing well. So, if the SurvivalPunk income could be matching that, that would be fantastic. Uh, uh, then, anyway, that's a bad problem with laptops, where I, I think, I think my problem is, the laptops in that, like, sub $500 price range, just aren't built well. Um, they are absolutely built to break

14:18every two years or so. And then, at every, at every time point after two years, um, they perform worse and worse. And in a lot of cases, it doesn't even matter if you, um, if you refresh the operating system, a lot of times, computers will do well if you do a fresh install every couple of years, which is a huge pain in the ass. And companies know most people aren't going to do it. I think, currently, what my, what my desktop desperately needs, probably as a fresh install. Um, but, I need to add another, like, four gigabytes of RAM, which would take it to its, um, maximum. It's just not a very, it's not a very robust, uh, motherboard, where it can handle a huge amount of RAM, which would be nice,

15:19uh, especially based on, like, type jobs. One day in the future, I would love to have a, computer, that would really do well with editing video. Which is probably on the reasons why I don't do any video editing. It is such a laborious process with the, with the RAM that I have. It's just not, it's just not feasible. Anyway, the last point I want to cover, um, we'll talk cars actually. That's what we'll talk about. This is one, a lot of people fall into this trap. Cars are too fucking expensive to be doing this bullshit now. I think the last information I saw was the average car payment. It's like $400 a month. Average. Which means there's some

16:19low-ball ones bringing that shit down. Because I've easily seen um, car payments. They're rivaling mortgages. A, um, manager at my work one time told me that her monthly car payment was like 900 a month. Which is fucking insane. I can't even fathom that. Um, too high earners in a house. Yeah. They can afford it. But that trap of getting into that is just retarded. I have always, except for once, gone and bought a used car when I needed one. More optimally, I could be saved my money in a high yield savings account until the car broke down. And then buying a good car. Um, but everyone's not perfect. However, so the car market has

17:21kind of taken a hit. And for a while there, it was very hard to find a good used car. It can't happen. It absolutely can happen. Um, but you got to work harder probably than you used to, right? People on Facebook marketplace selling cars that are like, no engine and half of a body, $6,000. I know what I got. Y'all are stupid. Um, don't do that bullshit. But if you look around, you can, you can definitely get some. And if you have any kind of mechanical ability, even better, there's a lot of very cosmetic things that need a little bit of work. And then you'll have a good car. So, this is the James4ShallPunk.com. Still not feeling amazing, but the outlawedest of I've used guys.