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This past weekend, our freezer broke  For us, having a freezer is a necessity not a luxury.  We raw feed our puppies, and since they go through about 60 pounds of meat a month between the two of them, it is essential that we buy in bulk when meat is very cheap or that we have a place to store meat we got for free from hunter friends.  I also like to cook a bunch of meals at one time and freeze them.  So, it wasn’t a question of whether we would buy a new freezer or not, it was more a question of “who can we buy a freezer from tonight at 7 PM on a Saturday that will deliver it tomorrow before all 500 pounds of food in our existing warm-box goes bad.”  

Unfortunately, because we did not want to lose the 500 pounds of food in there and we had no place to relocate it to, we were somewhat limited in our options.  We could not wait for a good deal, we couldn’t buy online to stack coupons, and we had to take time-of-delivery into consideration as well as price.  Needless to say, these are far from ideal purchasing conditions.  Unfortunately, I don’t know how we could have avoided this, save having an extra freezer on hand at all times just in case something like this happens (which doesn’t seem entirely cost effective).  I guess we could have tried to predict when the freezer would have failed, but sadly my psychic powers just aren’t what I wish they were… so I don’t think there was too much we could have done to avoid getting ourselves into this situation.

For a brief moment, we considered buying a used freezer off craigslist or someplace.  We rejected this for 2 reasons.  Partly, we rejected it because of the urgency issue described above.  But, the biggest reason is we didn’t think this would be cost effective.  The warm-box that was our freezer had been purchased off Craigslist in May and here we were in September and it was already not functioning.  We tend to work a freezer hard by filling it to the brim, and its also pretty hard to verify the age of a used freezer (unless the owner has receipts or something) so we didn’t want to go that route again.  Since we have to have it, we decided that we’d just go into a store and look for a good quality freezer that would last us a long time.

We tried Best Buy first, and faced our first dilemma.  There were 2 freezers there that we were deciding between.  One was nice… good sized, electronic panel on the door, door ajar alarm, etc.  It was a decent size, but not quite as large as I would have hoped.  Then, right next to it for $100 more was a freezer of comparable quality, except for the fact that it was energy star and much larger.  

Now, we are hoping to have this freezer for the duration, like 10-15 years.  So, here was the question… did we want to spend the extra $100 now to get something that was my idea of a ‘perfect’ freezer?  Normally this would be a no-brainer, but we don’t have any money saved up for a purchase like this and we weren’t expecting to make this purchase, so it is hard to justify spending $689.00 + tax and delivery just at the drop of a hat.  

My deliberation also brought up another interesting question… once I see myself using something “for the foreseeable future” isn’t it always easier to talk myself into upgrading just one more time?  If I upgrade to the bigger freezer, well then its only another $50 more to upgrade to an even bigger one.  And then its only another $25 for one with glass shelves.  And then… well you see where I am going with this.  And this is an even more dangerous game to play for things like electronics (I’m going to have this tv for the next 15 years, might as well go for the 65′ Sony Plasma with 1080P HD and surround sound) or even cars.    

So, where do you draw the line?  How much weight do you give your present budget, versus the need to buy something you are still going to be happy with in 10 years so you don’t need to make another purchase until absolutely necessary?  

For us, we ended up buying neither freezer at Best Buy.  We checked out a few more stores and got a freezer at Lowes for $583+ tax and delivery (which we will get back in a rebate).  The freezer was as large as the 2nd one at Best Buy, but didn’t have the electronic front panel.  I decided that wasn’t as important, and weighed my priorities to get one that I was happy with that didn’t hurt the budget too much.  Fortunately, we have 2 big checks coming in this week because DF worked a lot of overtime and I am up to full time hours…