To Buy Or Not To Buy

My Mom and Jon often give me a hard time about being cheap. I don' t think I'm cheap; I see it as being frugal. In my head, whenever I see dollar signs, it's immediately followed with folders with labels like "BILLS", "CREDIT CARDS", "STUDENT LOANS", and "SAVINGS".  Once the little piggy banks that live in each one are satisfied, in my mind there shouldn't be anything left. This thinking has caused more than a few conversations about the importance of having a good sized wardrobe, going on vacations, buying extras. For my birthdays and christmas my mom buys me clothes or takes me to the mall to treat me to some new clothes. I don't walk around in rags! But she feels the need for more clothes. Jon and I have never gone on a vacation, we had one planned for May, but we just decided to cancel it and put the money from it into savings. Not a bad decision right? My motto is you can never go wrong with putting money into savings. Course the exception is, if you put money for bills into savings!

Our latest topic of debate is on purchasing a desk. I had a fairly ugly one before that we got for $5 from someone. This thing is special. I've never seen anything like it before. The legs are weird and pointy, the drawers are annoying and it's table top has a map on it. Which is ok; if that's your thing! This is a picture I took of it when we first got it a couple years ago.



This past Christmas I bought Jon a 55 Gallon fish tank and we didn't have anywhere to put it so I gave up my "computer" desk and moved my stuff to the bedroom dresser. That was ok, but got old really fast. So I built my own desk out of boxes in our storage room, some pieces of wood and roofing. I was pretty proud of myself. And since then it's served me well. It's nothing pretty to look at but it's stable and works. However, I seem to be outnumbered here.

So I looked for a cheap cost-efficient desk to appease my opponents.  I found a few but there was always reasons why they weren't that great. Either they didn't seem very sturdy or well built. Or there was some bad reviews about them. I've sorta given up looking. After a while they all kind of blend together. We found this one that we both like from Sears

 



Cons:

-It doesn't have the best reviews
-It costs more than I wanted to spend
-Do I really need a new desk?

Pros:

-It fits my decorating (or ideal) scheme.
-We could get it in town instead of driving to the city (convenient)
-It would fit all my desk type things and more
-I would be more organized and therefore more productive?

So what do you guys think? How important is your desk/workspace to you? Do you use a desk? Should we go with the above desk, keep looking, or keep using what we have?