DVD Collection

Keeping with the videophile theme, I started to look over our own DVD and now Blu-ray collections. You’re probably thinking, here’s a guy who has a personal finance blog with frugal tips that owns a Blu-ray player? As stated before, my wife and I do enjoy watching movies. With my research and patience, I was able to get a PlayStation 3 for just over $200 on eBay via a gift card and Microsoft’s cashback program. Rejoice!

Our collection of DVDs probably surpasses 200 and currently we have just 7 Blu-ray discs. These have been accumulated over many years or we have received as gifts. I would imagine our collection is fairly modest compared to the average household. Of course, we never paid retail for any of them, but let’s assume we did. We’ll say the average DVD upon release was $18 and the Blu-ray was $30. That is nearly $4,000 spent on movies over the years! To put that in perspective, that is over 18 years of Netflix with 3 out at a time!

So now to the guts of this article. We spend so much on all these movies, but how often do we really watch them? For how often we watch newly released movies or movies recommended by friends, it seems we have less and less time to watch our favorites. I admit, there are some movies I probably never watched since purchasing, but then there are those that I could watch over and over and never get sick of them (Lord of the Rings for instance).

So there you have it, I’m guilty of spending money on things that are just material items than anything. It’s like buying a new car and driving it off the lot, the value of DVDs decline rapidly. Couple that with the advancing technology of Blu-ray, your DVD collection slowly becomes obsolete. You say to yourself, you never know where an instance will arise that you will want to watch a given movie. But will it ever happen?

Think of it like this, you’ll spend $8 to go see a movie in a theater. Then you may spend $4 to rent it to watch it with some friends or maybe go right to the store when it’s released to buy it for $20. It’s not too hard to figure you could almost spend over $30 for a single movie that you only watch a handful of times.

While it’s not an easy thing to replace going to the theater, because that is just one of those experiences my wife and I enjoy, we really need to work on saving money by not buying movies anymore. With the emergence of on demand movies, Hulu.com and Netflix, there really is no excuse to purchase movies. If you have an itch to watch a movie again, put in your queue and wait!

You don’t know how many people I know that have a wall full of DVDs, but yet I never see them watch them. It almost seems like we are brainwashed into buying them. I’m sure the situation is different if you have kids, as kids enjoy watching the same movie on repeat for days. I think that is a valid situation to purchase movies.

While I don’t think we’ll totally abstain from purchasing movies, I think we’ll make a better conscious decision whether or not the movie (or TV show) belongs in our ultimate collection.

Do you feel you are overspending on DVDs or Blu-rays? Have any of you already adopted a ‘no DVD or Blu-ray buying’ strategy? What is your reason for buying?

Stupidly Yours,

Matt

photo courtesy of Andres Rueda

Matt

Matt

StupidCents was founded by Matt in 2009. His thoughts are shaped by his family and career and seasoned by his endless motivation to succeed personally, professionally, and financially.