Thanks useful information: 
Nonsense Arthur. Complete tosh.Originally Posted by arthurking83
Practically anyone here can afford a new f/4 prime, never mind a second-hand one. You just have to have a sense of priorities.
But people go on drinking take-away coffee Two cups a day = 2 * $5 * 5 days a week * 52 weeks = a brand new 600/4 in five years. Just for making your own coffee! It's not hard.
Learn to cut your own hair. That's not hard either, even easier if you get someone in your family to do it for you. There is a thousand bucks every two or three years, just waiting for you to save it.
How many shirts do you need in a year? Eight or ten? There is $500. I get them from the op shop. I spend $10 on shirts for a year. Easiest money I ever saved.
Grow your own vegetables: saves hundreds every year, keeps you fit, calms your soul, and saves quite a few hundred dollars. And you get to eat far better, healthier, tastier fruit than you will ever see in a supermarket in a hundred years.
Drive your old car a year or two longer instead of trying to keep up with your neighbour's new model. There is another $2000 saved a year.
Learn how to cook. Eat out for a meal? Average cost $20 to $50. Make it yourself: $3. $5 if you want to be extravagant.
Stop putting things on credit card. Wait a few weeks and pay cash. save anywhere between a few hundred and several thousands a year.
Eat less meat. The average Australian eats 4 or 5 times more meat than is healthy. And it's expensive! Have a couple of meat-free days each week and you feel healthier, live longer, smell sweeter, enjoy life more. And you save a lot of money.
Cancel that Foxtel subscription. It's costing you hundreds of dollars a year and, let's face it, the programs are rubbish. Three years of cancelled Foxtel = the difference between a 150-600/6.3 and a good condition used 500/4.
Turn off the aircon! What are you, a whimp? This is Australia. It's a hot country. Get used to it. Aircon costs you thousands of dollars, both to buy and to run. If you are under 60 and you can't live without it, stop asking questions, you are a whimp and you don't deserve a nice lens.
And I haven't even mentioned the insane sums people spend on new carpet (around about the price of a 400/4 DO II for an average suburban house, and that's cheap carpet.) Or curtains. Or exercise equipment they use three times and then throw in the shed. Or paying other people to mind the children, weed the garden, clean the house, wash the dog. Or the ridiculous size of the McMansions most people buy.
Or the fact that, simply by moving to a nicer part of Australia than Sydney or Melbourne (which is pretty much all of it, after all) and buying one of the best houses in that town (rather than the below-average one you get for 1.1 million in Sydney), over your 30-year mortgage you save enough to buy eighty three 500/4 lenses with a 300/2.8 in change. Go on, don't take my word for it, do the sums for yourself. Look up the median house price in Sydney, assume a 10% deposit, assume a sensible interest rate (I used 5%, which you'd be absolutely dead lucky to get over 30 years, but let's be generous and assume it anyway) and do the sums. In Sydney, over the 30 years, you are paying a total of $1,932,577.84. (Melbourne is not a whole lot better.) Now get out into the real Australia - you might have to take a bit of a pay cut, who cares? You will have healthier kids, a better lifestyle, a bigger back yard, and $300,00 will buy you a nice little house; $600,000 will get you one of the best, most luxurious houses in town. Let's say you go with the beautiful $600,000 mansion (it will be about equal to a $1.8 million house in Sydney - we aren't talking wooden shacks here) and you pay that same 10% deposit and take that same 30-year mortgage. Your total cost over the 30 years: $966,278.92. You have just saved a cool million bucks, or 83 Canon or Nikon 500mm f/4L IS II lenses with a 300/2.8 thrown in.
Don't tell me you "can't afford" a nice lens. That's bull. You can afford any lens you want. You just have to decide whether you'd rather have a fantastic lens or drink McDonalds coffee every day. It's not hard.
Reply With Quote
