I adopted a defective lizard from a breeder for a 20$ fee. This particular defect often results in culling the animal, as it is often too expensive and time-consuming to care for. Because of this, not much is known about its care.

I now am one of the most prominent "experts" on caring for this particular subset of creature. Though no one but the most experienced keepers should own one, I am still happy to give information to folks who may have to care for one, either from rescue or purchasing one before knowing exactly what they're getting into.

Aside from being able to give advice on keeping these creatures alive, that's not all the value: the real value is my stupid lizard. I got him literally just a couple of weeks before the pandemic & lockdowns started. He's an absolute angel who has brought me so much joy in my darkest times. He's sweet, gentle, goofy, and is a wonderful companion animal. He now has complete freedom in the front of my home (when he's not in his vivarium) with his own heatlamp, ramp, and a view of the road where he love watching all the cars go by.

I love my stupid lizard. ❤️

Vasectomy.

By far the best purchase I have ever made for myself. Seriously.

A computer when I was still a kid. I wouldn't be the quant and maths PhD I am today without it, that shit literally shaped my life.

I just kept messing around with it when I was 7 years old. I learned to write .bat files and create DOS bootable floppy drives for my games at that age (you needed to play around with Soundblaster drivers and DOS extenders at the time). Then at the same age I quickly discovered BASIC thanks to the fact that MS-DOS used to include QBasic. Then learned some basic assembly using MS-DOS's included DEBUG tool. Then my father got me floppy disks with Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++ on them and then I learned that shit again just by fucking around and looking at the examples, all at the age 7~8.

I coded like a monkey but I still coded and at a very early age I already knew what people usually learn first in university computer science classes.

By the age of 14 I already knew how to write my own minimal bootloader in assembly and a basic 32-bits kernel in C. (then later on math ironically won me over, so ended up formally pursuing applied math with a tiny bit of computer science because I just didn't need it and the whole exposure to programming at a very young age helped me a lot)

All of that was just thanks to the little spark I got when I first got that Pentium MMX computer.

The paid version of Sync for Reddit. I paid $1 and used it for 13 years.

I went back to college at 30. That set me up for a career I actually enjoyed and a wage that was double the dead end job I had at the time.

A really nice kitchen knife. I use it daily and it makes cooking so much more fun, which translates into eating less junk food and take out, saving a ton of money and being more healthy.

End of 2008 start of 2009 I bought a house. It was VERY risky move for me at the time.

Not only has it been a temp house for others that needed help. But with the wild costs of apartments these days I simply don't understand how people haven't just flat out started a revolution over it. There's an apartment complex that opened in my town very recently. The units are much smaller than my house but cost more than double my mortgage. And that's just for where they actually list the price, there's some I'm guessing are so expensive they don't list the price they just say "contact us".

I’ll say right off the bat that my roomba i7 self emptying vacuum cleaner has been a game changer for me. 2 big ass dogs and the dirt/fur that comes with it made me loathe sweeping/manually vacuuming. $700 well spent.

A subscription to the now defunct children's magazine 3-2-1 Contact. That magazine would sometimes include the code for simple BASIC computer programs. Eventually I figured out they would run on the (then common) Apple II classroom computer at school, tried one (a simple guess the number game with a preset answer), figured out how to change the answer and tweak the code, and got hooked.

Ultimately this led to a degree in software engineering and a job in IT that I quite enjoy, especially when writing scripts or working with code.

My sewing machine. I (m) wanted curtains, my wife didn't want to sow them (no sewing machine didn't help).

Bought it last year (€270), made curtains troughout the house, monthly energy bill went from €630 to €230 a month due to savings on heating. (And I learned something new, always fun)

Phones are expensive but...

I mean I think my screen time is at like 5-6 hours a day. I can do almost all the things with it.

It is fragile tho. Probably won't last more than a few years.

...still, landslide victory in the cost/utility category, despite the high cost.

I bought a $700 acoustic guitar when I was 17. That thing is now old enough to buy porn.

For me, my Steam Deck. I have been having a lot of mental health issues and it allows me to have an outlet for anxiety and stress while still spending time with my family. I use is most days and have enjoyed a good chunk of my extensive Steam catalog to boot. Honestly, the most bang for my buck I have ever gotten.

Something I wish my employer realized is how much value they would get out of providing their developers with good hardware instead of crappy laptops. When it takes 15 minutes to change a line, compile and run the software I'm working on, I'm not going to be very productive.

For context, I work on 2 separate projects that need separate development environments (because they have some conflicting dependencies). One of them has to be in a VM, which significantly affects performance. The laptop was high end 3 years ago, but now it's beaten even by an Intel i3. It also doesn't help that the compamy has installed 2 anti-virus software that take up like 30-40% cpu while I am running builds.

Another crappy thing they did was move the infrastructure to AWS... And it costs a ton, performance is shit, and copying files from the build servers is a nightmare... we have to remote into some "copy machine" on AWS, copy the files from the build server to the "copy machine" via samba, upload the files to some internal tool (that's like OneDrive but worse in every way), and the tool will sync it to our machine. Oh, and the copy machine has very limited storage, it's win10 on a 40gb drive. It's insane.

A car.

Freedom of mobility is huge. Not worrying about how to get groceries home. Being able to go to a doctor when necessary.

Recreational aspects, took a drive through Washington State, up the Olympic Penninsula and down through Seattle and Everett.

My playstation 4, I've had it who knows how many years. Not only do I have countless hours of gaming, but it's also my primary media device.

Have an original N64 from like 98, no idea how many hours of enjoyment I've gotten out of that.

Ceramic skateboard bearings I bought in 2001, as well as a pair of grind king trucks from maybe 97 that I still ride.

A $150 laptop that I learned to code on years ago. It got me out of minimum wage jobs and onto a real career.

I don’t have it anymore. It got stolen. Obviously have upgraded to something better.

My woodshop of 220v saws. They paid for themselves remodeling my house and building most of the furniture and all the cabinets in it. So, now they paid for themselves and I can make whatever I want. Saw brrrr noises are my therapy. I think I'm slowly becoming Nick Offerman.

The price of hardwoods is too damn high.

Dutch settlers purchased Manhattan from the indigenous Americans for beads and other goods valued at 60 guilders (about $1,000 today).

My doggo

My dry herb vaporizer, used to spend 0.3-0.5g on a spliff joint and now I'm using 0.05-0.15g per bowl while getting great effects, flavour, and level of convenience, and ofc.. I stopped combusting, so it's better for my health too. Returned it's value after few weeks tops.

Commuting bike instead of car

My 2006 Toyota Rav4. I have done less than 5 k in repairs in 17 years,

A $5 stick-on hook. (Command brand)

It’s a place to hang my pants at night, so they’re not on the floor. Makes my whole routine better.

Community Rec center membership. For a one time fee of $10; it's easily the best $10 I've ever spent and is a great city perk. I've gotten in great shape since going there.

Cd bruner in the early 90s.

I paid 600$ cash for a 4 speed cd burner.

I made my money back in 6 weeks.

Everything after that was pure profit.

I bought a Global brand Santoku knife like 20 years ago and it’s still my favorite knife. It was when I got my first solo apartment and I had basically no kitchen stuff. Instead of a cheap knife block, I got one good knife.

I hate calling “purchases” “investments” but it might apply in this case.

Monster Hunter World. 80$, 1600 hours and counting. I'll finish it one day. Yes, I know I'm playing it wrong.

I bought counterstrike source way back in like 2008/2009 when I got a computer fast enough to play it. Steam was pushing garrysmod as a 5 dollar bundle purchase with counterstrike, and I bought that too on a whim.

I liked garrysmod more than cs:s, and played it a bunch. Eventually I figured out how to add wiremod to the game, which also involved using svn (a source control precursor to git)

I learned basic digital circuits and boolean logic by making bases with elevators and fancy alarm systems that would shoot intruders with turrents and stuff.

Eventually wiremod added a programming language called expression2, which was a mashup of c and lua. I basically taught myself coding because of a video game.

This lead me to get into computer programming, and eventually computer security, which ended up being a lucrative career path.... So thanks Garry for your mod, and thanks Gabe for pushing said mod to kids that just wanted to shoot virtual terrorists. That 5 dollar game is responsible for a good chunk of my life :)

I bought a Bethany Homes Lefse griddle. It's cast aluminum, gets up to 500 Fahrenheit, and is the closest thing you can get to a restaurant flat top without rewiring your kitchen. I've saved my wife and I so much money cooking at home. I've owned griddles before, but nothing this high quality, high temp, and easy to clean. I now prefer my homemade smash burgers to eating out and by the time my patties are done resting, I've already cleaned the griddle.

Probably the SawStop cabinet saw I bought a few weeks ago. It's way easier/less sketchy than my job site table saw when cutting large panels, and the peace of mind it gives me from a general safety perspective is priceless. I have been doing a lot of projects with full sheets of plywood since I bought it, which has been an aspect of woodworking that I dreaded before. No more crawling around with a circular saw or precariously balancing between a job site saw and an extra table

Form me personally, I'd have to say my automated espresso machine. For context; I was buying 1-2 coffees from a shop per day (let's say 10/week on average).

Cost me $700 on a sale. Grinds & presses the beans by itself, then pushes boiling water through to give me espresso shots. It paid for itself in 6 months of ownership by weening me off the local shops, and it's lasted for over 6 years so far.

Instead of ~$4.50 per coffee, it's like $24 for a bulk bag of beans at Costco that lasts me 3 weeks, and a carton of half-and-half that lasts me like a month. That's like $180/mo → $35/mo

Bidet is up there.

Saxx underwear or B3neath. No more batwing. Play around with some other brands, Hanes makes one with a pouch that doesn’t feel right for my body type but I could see it being comfortable. All citizens makes a good one. Duluth ballpark pouch was too lazy of a fit and held sweat.