Owning property is a great feeling. When you own your own home, the responsibilities go through the roof (quite literally sometimes) from what your old landlord used to take care of. Well, the good landlords at least. Fixing leaks, changing door knobs and pulling Chewbacca-esque clumps of hair out of the drains are menial chores compared to the other caveats of having no one to accept repair responsibility but yourself.
Owning a car is slightly different. When your car needs repair, the first line of defense, in some cases, is the manufacturer's warranty. You check if the damaged component is covered. If so, you take your vehicle into an authorized warranty repair facility and badaboom, problem resolved. Otherwise, repair shops are widely available to screw you over and advise that the entire air conditioning system needs replacement and that it will cost three times the Kelly Blue Book value of your car.
Owning a slightly lesser value item such as a computer or fancy, over-hyped wireless phone is different all in itself. Warranty repairs are available, usually within the first year or 90 days, unless you purchase an extended warranty which covers less than the original manufacturer's warranty. When the device you purchased gets updated, such as the _Phone series from that temptational fruit manufacturer based in Cupertino, or the "dark-colored" -berry series from that Canadian company in Waterloo, you go out and replace your current device, because "everyone else" is going to get one yet nothing is wrong with your old device.
A beach towel, an old bag (no no, not that kind of old bag), cheap slippers (sleepahs) and a reusable plastic cup (one of the fancy types with a snap-on lid and bumpy straw) are financially more affordable, yet extremely more valuable. Let us presume that the mentioned items in this paragraph have a total bear market value of $20.73, which happens to be the INTC closing price of 8-4-2010. You probably purchased them in a local Walmart or any other conglomerate of that magnitude within the same industry. These items do not yield any quarterly dividends like the cash value equivalent of INTC stock. At home, there is no specified or functional use of these items in a collective manner. When you go to the beach, you are "M(r, s, rs). prepared" for a long and fruitful burning of your epidermal pigmentation under the celestial, thermal sphere of gas that second graders usually always draw in their pictures near the upper left or right corner of the page. Beach days would not be the same without these objects and you know this well. One of the reasons we go to the beach is to swim in the ocean to get wet. Some people get wet without water, but that's a whole different story. Far too many times, rain begins to pour from the sky while we're at the beach. We don't mind if we get rained on because we're already wet, but our stuff?!?! Our $20.73 worth of non dividend paying, Walmart bargain isle junk cannot be put through such vile waterboarding torture. What do some of us do? We leave the beach to save our junk from getting wet. Meh..
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