travel vs tamiya

[beefmuffin]

hey home boys and girls (mostly boys). i was just thinking of something yesterday and i thought maybe some of you could relate, even if you'd never quite thought of it in quite so stark of terms. but basically, here goes:

i used to think nothing of going away places, spending $200 or more a night on hotel, $300-500 domestic on airfare, $60/day care rental, etc. actually to be honest i often spent a lot more than that per night in some places. but that was before getting back into something like this where going away for 4 days like that would be equivalent to getting a NIB kit (or two) each day, and that's a low estimate before other expenses are factored in, or something like international airfare, etc.

so i kind of feel less inclined to do frivolous travel, which often just amounts to eating meals, shopping and killing time at a different set of coordinates. instead of that weekend trip to, say, philadelphia which is only a few hours drive, i'd rather just visit for the day or stay home and with the money saved get a Nova Fox. or two. almost makes me regret some of the insane travel splurges from the past... like the mexican villa $1,000 per night! sure it had its own private pool, so i didn't need to feel like the kids were laughing at my white pasty blubbery body while swimming. but that's a NIB super champ per night.

[Dinsdale_71]

I suppose it's all relative to how many $$$ you have in the first place? (Or what your income is.)

If you can afford to travel and treat yourself to new stuff than fine. If you budget is tight and you have to save up for things then it's harder to choose where to spend your money - if you do villas at $1000 a night I don't see you in this category..

I struggle to justify spending money on 'toys' when there is other stuff I should be spending it on. If I can afford to do both then not so bad. I wouldn't make the family go without a holiday so that I could buy myself a treat, I know some who do though.

There are rich and there are poor, I'm somewhere in between, I know the value of money and I don't like to waste it, I do however occasionally treat myself to a new toy (or two).

[TA-Mark]

I always thought that a good holiday was sending the kids to your parents for a few days while you stay home and play with the RC cars uninterrupted. But now that they've grown and have RC cars of their own, the holiday seems to be keeping their cars running, while you occasionally get a run of your own in.

Spending those amounts on a night out, or a few days out i'd rather spend on new toys, or on my cars. (I am talking about disposable funds, and not funds for living expenses).

[gordb]

The one that always kills me is watching the price of a NIB going into our supermarket shopping for three hungry little boys every week or so. Not that I'm in any way suggesting choosing between the two - just an interesting yard stick (and one that I use to assuage my guilt after ordering new kits ... like a pair of Agrioses for example).

[Dinsdale_71]

Sorry kids, no food this month, Daddy's bought himself a Sand Scorcher.....

[danb1974]

You have to balance traveling with hobby spending. If I'd stay all year at home no travel I'd go nuts. OTOH no travelling to fancy expensive places, just nice quiet ones where I can actually relax (mountain lakes are my favorite), decently priced so there still are some hobby money left.

[bromvw]

I'am hearing you bro . Its always a balancing act between expences . As you know times are fairly tough in the UK and look like they may remain so for quite some time . Rather than taking short vacations we're decided to save the money and put it towards one good long break per year instead till things improve . We'll still do the odd weekend trip to the Drag racing and other reasonably local events but we'll camp to keep the costs down .

[MadInventor]

I'd say spend the cash on the holidays if you enjoy it. If you've already got a several models in a collection do you really NEED another model ??? I once spent a lot of money going for a 20 minute flight in a 2 seat Spitfire (The plane, not the triumph abomination) when I was a student. It was a frivolous use of cash and I had nothing to show for it when I came back to earth, but it was a once in a lifetime experience and the best money I ever spent.

Given the choice between going Spitfire flying again or buying 3 or 4 expensive RCs, the 27litre option is going to win every time

[mr crispy]

Yeah choosing wisely is sometimes pretty hard. Having effectively been a house wife (house husband if it bothers you) for 3 years now I have to pick what I spend cash on real carefully.

I haven't been on a drunken lads night out for years and TBH, I don't miss them much. Did plenty on that in my 20s & 30s! Today I wonder how I managed to waste so much money on renting alcohol for a few hours?

Its my 40th birthday next year and times are pretty tight but I want something I'll remember for years, and MadInventors Spitfire tail is right up my alley. So I'm planning to have a few glider lessons from Kenley aerodrome. Not quite as good as sitting behind a Merlin engine but soaring above and coming into land at a real WW2 airfield that's hardly changed since the 1940's sounds like a pretty good day out me

[wolfdogstinkus]

You can't buy memories.

[Tamiya1/10]

How one spend money is really dictated by age, economic condition, needs and experiences. Currently you believe spend on RC is proper, but several years later you will likely change direction. There is no real or proper way on how to spend your leisure funds as long as won't eat into your regular expenses.

[bromvw]

How one spend money is really dictated by age, economic condition, needs and experiences. Currently you believe spend on RC is proper, but several years later you will likely change direction. There is no real or proper way on how to spend your leisure funds as long as won't eat into your regular expenses.

I totally agree . yesterday we hosted a garden party . bought a new BBQ and a gazebo .Dragged the sound system outside . Good food , plenty of drinks and good company . Did'nt cost a fortune and we all had a really fantastic day . Sometimes the simple things in life are the most enjoyable .

[beefmuffin]

If you can afford to travel and treat yourself to new stuff than fine. If you budget is tight and you have to save up for things then it's harder to choose where to spend your money - if you do villas at $1000 a night I don't see you in this category..

don't jump to any conclusions here - think of it more as MadInventor's Spitfire splurge. it was an interesting experience, but in my mind, nothing much better than staying somewhere 1/5 the price. but that's my point... now that i get so much enjoyment out of my newly rediscovered tamiyaphilia i don't see myself splurging on stuff like this anymore. having tried it, it wasn't as special as it'd seem, and my wife and i hardly even remember.

The one that always kills me is watching the price of a NIB going into our supermarket shopping for three hungry little boys every week or so. Not that I'm in any way suggesting choosing between the two - just an interesting yard stick (and one that I use to assuage my guilt after ordering new kits ... like a pair of Agrioses for example).

oh shush - the thread isn't about balancing spending on basic needs with tamiya, it's about having been generally disappointed with the ROI of travel based on the high cost and mostly mediocre experience vs the ROI on tamiya which in the grand scheme of things are pretty cheap. my entire collection could be had for the price of one big expensive vacation. if the choice is spending money in another set of coordinates and no tamiya collection, or having a just as fulfilling 'staycation' and - bonus - an entire tamiya collection to go along with it... as of now the choice is really starkly for the latter.

Sorry kids, no food this month, Daddy's bought himself a Sand Scorcher.....

come on now - see my reply to gordb above

I'd say spend the cash on the holidays if you enjoy it. If you've already got a several models in a collection do you really NEED another model ??? I once spent a lot of money going for a 20 minute flight in a 2 seat Spitfire (The plane, not the triumph abomination) when I was a student. It was a frivolous use of cash and I had nothing to show for it when I came back to earth, but it was a once in a lifetime experience and the best money I ever spent.

Given the choice between going Spitfire flying again or buying 3 or 4 expensive RCs, the 27litre option is going to win every time

you know i also had a great flying experience taking a seaplane around the seattle and pueget sound area. gorgeous. except it wasn't very expensive at all. in fact, it was less that the cost of our room for one night. so that's what i'm getting at. the basics while traveling often add up quite quickly and relative to something like tamiya which realistically is a bargain for those that love it the value seems to veer away from things like hotel bills and airfare. maybe not necessarily not travelling at all - but where in the past i might have gone for a pricier room, these days i'd think of a $100 a night difference as a NIB Grasshopper kit a night, etc.

Yeah choosing wisely is sometimes pretty hard. Having effectively been a house wife (house husband if it bothers you) for 3 years now I have to pick what I spend cash on real carefully.

I haven't been on a drunken lads night out for years and TBH, I don't miss them much. Did plenty on that in my 20s & 30s! Today I wonder how I managed to waste so much money on renting alcohol for a few hours?

i hear you - i've had a similar experience. struggling quite a bit actually. which is partly the reason this stuff comes to mind. not that the important things need to be weighed against the hobby - obviously they take precedence - but as you say dropping $$$ on a night out of drinking or at a club of some sort or another just seems completely unpalatable to me at the moment.

You can't buy memories.

true - but a lot of memories can be had close to home, no?

[beefmuffin]

How one spend money is really dictated by age, economic condition, needs and experiences. Currently you believe spend on RC is proper, but several years later you will likely change direction. There is no real or proper way on how to spend your leisure funds as long as won't eat into your regular expenses.

ha well - despite how it may have sounded this wasn't really meant as a home economics exercise. it was more a realization of the relative enjoyment vs cost of a couple of things we all have experience with. my evaluation of the value of travel was already shifting as i had less funds to throw at it, but now that i've also gotten back into all this it seems even moreso a bad return on investment overall. if i buy a kit to do with my son, or to play with with my young cousins, or even just to look at to remind me of my dad and my own growing up, all of that seems a to be so much of a better value than a strange bed in a strange room in a strange place with a whopping bill at the end.

[danb1974]

The value is not expressed strictly in money. For me a week in a quiet location, a room with a view to the lake and surrounding mountains and so on are worth more then the money spent on it - and I will happily drive 1000km to get there. Same goes for some experiences that you should have at least once (like riding in a rollercoaster).

Heck, just from the money perspective I'd have to sell the (real 1:1) car and get a bike - imagine how many rc cars I could buy then.

[JeepnMike]

Cash for new RC builds, credit for vacations. Problem solved (or exasperated depending on how you look at it!) LOL. The post about not having food for the kids because daddy bought an RC car was funny. I know there was one pay period where I spent a lot more than I should have on RC stuff and had to use a credit card for food and stuff. Talk about feeling like a schmuck with my tail between my legs and I was the only person that knew about it! My conscience was burning spending a weekend at home with the kids and nothing to do and I knew why. lol

[wolfdogstinkus]

true - but a lot of memories can be had close to home, no?

Yes that's kinda what I meant, it doesn't matter how you spend your money, as long as you enjoy it.

(I was gonna write something about blowing it all on cocaine and hookers and how it wasn't wasted as you still have memories but it wasn't suitable on a family forum.)

I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered

George Best

[Grumpy pants]

It's a good thread this one, it does raise some interesting points.

I think as we get older simple pleasures like Tamiya are very rewarding and it is a great way to switch off after a tough day. Also for a lot of us it brings back fond memories whilst creating new ones.

Tamiya is also very accessible financially you don't need big money to buy a brasher and it is also a really good way of involving your kids and getting some fresh air and having some fun.

I've got 3 gorgeous daughters who help me clean my cars and they race them around the garden, 2 of our most heavily used cars were around £50 each second hand.

Club like this one really do help to keep the costs down with tips, parts and so much more.

For me the big travel and big nights out are further down the list of things I now prefer to do.

But for the record beefmuffin the villa does sound great! And as for the kids not eating that really was quite amusing!

[markbt73]

With me, it comes down more to the value of the time rather than the money. Not that money isn't a concern, but I only get 2 weeks off per year and am lucky to get that (we Americans get the short end of that stick, from what I'm told), so how to spend that time requires some careful planning. My wife and I both like to travel, but we have some different ideas about how that "travel" time is spent. She likes to sit on the beach at a resort and sip on something with an umbrella in it, and I get bored after about three hours of that. I'd rather keep moving and see things.

But the other side of that is that she works from home, so she wants to go places any time she can. I have a half hour commute to work, so when I get home I want to stay there. Instead of spending eight hours on an airplane to spend five days on a beach with nothing to do, I'd rather spend a week at home getting familiar with a new Bruiser kit and spend half as much money. But if I did that, what would she do? Ah, there's the rub...

Maybe that's why my favorite trips of ours are a simple two-hour drive out to the coast, to a rented house with a beach where I can run an RC car if I want. Hmm... it might be time to plan another one of those.

[MadInventor]

Yeah choosing wisely is sometimes pretty hard. Having effectively been a house wife (house husband if it bothers you) for 3 years now I have to pick what I spend cash on real carefully.

I haven't been on a drunken lads night out for years and TBH, I don't miss them much. Did plenty on that in my 20s & 30s! Today I wonder how I managed to waste so much money on renting alcohol for a few hours?

Its my 40th birthday next year and times are pretty tight but I want something I'll remember for years, and MadInventors Spitfire tail is right up my alley. So I'm planning to have a few glider lessons from Kenley aerodrome. Not quite as good as sitting behind a Merlin engine but soaring above and coming into land at a real WW2 airfield that's hardly changed since the 1940's sounds like a pretty good day out me

I was fortunate enough to go for my flight from Duxford airfield, in a genuine combat veteran Spitfire ML407. Went out and flew around in the surrounding area, did some 3-4g loops, rolls, pulled a couple of hard turns when another plane wanted to play and tried to get in behind us . Very little sensation of speed at height until the pilot points the wings vertical to pass between 2 clouds and they go by in an instant. Came back to the airfield for a low pass and a victory roll before coming into land. One of the most memorable bits was coming of the top of a loop, pointing straight down at the ground looking over the pilots shoulder with the long nose in front, and the ground laid out like a map coming up towards us with me still being pushed back into the seat by the acceleration. Absolutely fantastic, nothing like 1500 horsepower to put a smile on your face

[mr crispy]

That's sounds fantastic... maybe I should sell the RC's, give the kids beans on toast for the rest of the year and start saving

[Skottoman]

I've been traveling recently... Nice 3 week trip to Europe, and I do treasure that.

That said, I've had a really strong run buying and building kits for the past 4 years, and am taking a bit of a break.

I have quite a collection of NIB to build in my basement, and many to run, so for the time being, I'm going to start leaning more towards spending on travel.

Not that I won't be building again, just for the moment, my latest trip has really got me lusting for more travel!

Cheers,

Skottoman

[Tamiya1/10]

ha well - despite how it may have sounded this wasn't really meant as a home economics exercise. it was more a realization of the relative enjoyment vs cost of a couple of things we all have experience with. my evaluation of the value of travel was already shifting as i had less funds to throw at it, but now that i've also gotten back into all this it seems even moreso a bad return on investment overall. if i buy a kit to do with my son, or to play with with my young cousins, or even just to look at to remind me of my dad and my own growing up, all of that seems a to be so much of a better value than a strange bed in a strange room in a strange place with a whopping bill at the end.

In reality it is about home economic exercise. Substantianly most of us do not have unlimited funds so we have to place it where is worthwhile or greater value to us. if you have several million disposable slush funds , do you think you would care about $100. Or $1000 a night room or you likely have villas around the world or travel around in you $ million dollar motor home and we would not even be having this conversation as you will likely be telling us you are still waiting for the delivery of your new 1:1 black series

amg special tuned 850hp E63. oh i am waiting for my 950hp amg e65 super special black series:-D

[beefmuffin]

In reality it is about home economic exercise. Substantianly most of us do not have unlimited funds so we have to place it where is worthwhile or greater value to us. if you have several million disposable slush funds , do you think you would care about $100. Or $1000 a night room or you likely have villas around the world or travel around in you $ million dollar motor home and we would not even be having this conversation as you will likely be telling us you are still waiting for the delivery of your new 1:1 black series amg special tuned 850hp E63.

well, sort of yes and sort of no. the thing is that although it's easy for us all to see how we have choices of where to spend our limited resources, the idea that if we could afford things like yachts and lavish travel and villas we would automatically prefer doing those things gets back to my original point. although, sure, it removes one side of the equation since there sort of is a limit to how much you could possibly spend on tamiya gear... although the more creative among us might find ways to push those boundaries. but it isn't really only a question of money, although that's what first came to mind the other day when i was contemplating this. i'm sure that most if not all of us could afford to do something - anything - that's incrementally more expensive than R/C collecting. we could - as in, right now, instead of what we are choosing to do with tamiya. we could spend time on motorbikes, or art collecting, or etc etc - and some of us do already. but just because we can doesn't mean we automatically would want to. coming at it from the other way, you couldn't make the case that the only people who get into R/C are into it because it's all they can afford to do. i'm sure there is a spectrum of people's economic means represented in our group, and even with that a spectrum of how much of those means are directed into R/C.

so what i'm getting at, in response, is that it's more a function of the level of enjoyment we derive from various things. and lets face it, there are many different kinds of enjoyable things which are very different and hard to compare. one medium we have for comparison is money spent, since we're looking at two things that cost money. i think one of the more relevant outcomes of the thinking is an awareness for the very different scales on which we judge the value we derive from the same amount of money spent on two different sorts of things. it isn't always something we think about, since we're used to evaluating the benefit of each thing within its own scale of measurement, like celsius to fahrenheit. what struck me as being true for me, and i suspect it's probably true for some of you is - in going with the two scales of the measurement of temperature analogy - imagine that the temperature represents your level of enjoyment of some activity. the higher the F or C number, the higher the temperature, the higher the enjoyment... but as we all know the scales are different. you get more "bang for your buck" with each degree C than your do each degree F. you go from freezing to boiling in 100 degrees C, but it takes 180 degrees of F to get to the same temperature. and for each additional degree C the gap widens. without being overly specific this is how i was thinking about money spent on travel vs money spent on tamiya.

what i mean is, forget that one dollar/pound is one dollar/pound. replace the $ sign with the degree symbol. 50 degrees on travel vs 50 degrees on tamiya. now HERE is where the key is - what i'm trying to get at isn't about absolutes - having this or that, or how much you have - it's about the relative difference between two scales. what i'd argue is that, for those of us that have this love for this stuff, the scale of the value (think temperature) of a $ spent is a much steeper scale than that for travel. you need to spend a LOT more on travel to have a satisfactory experience. spending $200 to go on vacation virtually guarantees a horrible vacation, or just not even possible. but the same 200 degrees tamiya gets you to your boiling point. there are no absolutes here... but i think we can most of us relate to the idea that an even somewhat satisfying vacation is going to set us back a few grand (allowing for currency differences) you know what i mean. it struck me that one probably mediocre trip would cost more than my entire tamiya R/C collection. and even if i was a bazillionaire, it would make no sense to assume i would enjoy tamiya stuff any less. although tamiya modelling is a great bargain for the level of enjoyment it isn't just all of us settling for it because we can't afford other things to do.

so really it's an observation about how much you get for relatively little out of this stuff, and held in contrast to something that pops to mind as being on the other side of the spectrum - travel, which in my experience, although nice, is the opposite sort of bargain - it takes a comparative LOT of $ to get comparable enjoyment, all other things being equal.

[Tamiya1/10]

I think enjoyment is how one makes it and not how much money is involved. I enjoy building rc but i also enjoy the works of others, which costs me nothing. Is still enjoyment to me. I know people that have travelled across Europe over the summer with $100.00 in the pocket, which means camping for accomondation and the odd jobs here and there and they truly enjoyed it. i also know individuals that pretty well have everything or at least what i wanted, but were never seem to enjoy or appreciate it. Is like enjoying a $200 meal vs $20 meal. It all comes out the other end 5 hours later, so what it worth it? For me...no unless someone else is paying for it..but few years from now i may think differently even the enjoyment only lasted the few hours but the memory/experience/enjoyment would last a long time in my mind which i can replay it over and over in my mind. Enjoyment, happiness is what i make of it and if you see a nib is much more enjoyable and more bang for your buck than a cheap or expensive vacation you are right as i cannot tell you how to assign your value.