I mentioned the big TV we got earlier this month.  I contributed just $300, T covered the rest.  Then, all the sudden, he wanted a sound system & Bluray player!  Ok, it wasn’t all the sudden.  He’s been talking about the whole system for a long time, and claims that all he ever wanted when he was little was a sound system.  (So dramatic, no?)

And so, with my opinion remaining a calm “I think it is silly and we should wait a few months and think about it, but I’m not going to tell you what to do”… He bought it! He skipped the bluray (the technology should be getting cheaper) in favor of a DVD player that upconverts ($100) and picked out some speaker system ($600).  The TV was ~$1200.

Holy crap!  It isn’t like we are movie/TV geeks (we don’t even have cable), and we spend a lot of time being active outdoors.  But I guess, we do spend time a lot of our down time relaxing together with movies or TV episodes from Netflix.

Still, I’m not upset.  I know his rough cash position (lets just say it is more than mine), and while he’s a bit behind on retirement, he’s also 2 years younger and promised that he could contribute at least $3000 to his IRA this calendar year.

This is an atypical purchase, and not his usual frugal behavior..  Some people have gone far enough to call him the dreaded word:   “cheap”!  But that isn’t the case at all, he just insists on living within his means.   He thinks going out to eat at expensive restaurants all the time is a waste, but he paid for private pilot lessons one summer ($3000+?).  He used to buy the crappiest cheapest groceries, but when I asked him to buy a plane ticket to visit me in Asia for 2-3 weeks while I was studying abroad, he did it.  (At least $1500.)

I think he has some extra cash flow right now — his rent recently dropped and he’s doing a small amount contracting work on the side that pays ~$100/hr — a stark contrast to his grad student stipends/fellowships.

So, whatever.  I guess we’re getting a sound system.  It has an ipod docking station and he claims we’ll use it all the time to listen to jazz.  Uh, ok…  If it were up to me, we would have used the money to go on a vacation this fall or something.  But that’s ok, we have a honeymoon to look forward to coming up, and I”m not sure what my vacation time looks like anyway.