A FUCKING HOUSE

I wanted to upgrade the RAM and maybe the storage in my laptop, but I kept putting it off because I was being cheap.

Healthcare

I really want to do an electric conversion of a Geo Tracker.

One with a blown engine showed up on Craigslist for $1k two weeks before my daughter's due date.

Next time.

Two 8TB HDDs to finnish my NAS....

Retiring

A new bike to replace my 8 year old one. I can afford it, but I can't justify it. I will probably cave once winter boredom sets in or there is a black friday discount. I've been sitting on it for about a year.

Also a new car. Also sitting on that, waiting for the price to drop to 25K or less, probably next year. my current car needs tons of work, so I have been stretching it out because I didn't want to drop 5K on a 10 year old car that I was going to replace soon anyway. It's great, but I just want something that's quieter and more comfortable for long highway driving, which my current car isn't. after about 2 hours the seats in my current car start hurting my back and the noise from the roadway hurts my ears.

😭 i want so bad but these times it makes no sense

I want a new gaming computer and a gigantic monitor/tv to plug into. I'm broke to the point of skipping meals currently.

So many fountain pens.

A new NAS.

A new keyboard (my wife took my mechanical board so maybe I'll actually get this. The keyboard maxes at three simultaneous keys and it's killing me).

Everything to make my basement game room a reality.

A desk (currently using a borrowed old folding table from the in-laws).

Several books (like the annotated Lord of the Rings).

Resin 3D printer.

Instead of any of those I'm saving for an anniversary gift for my wife and to replace our cutting board which is about to split.

In 1995: a virtual boy

In 2015: an Oculus Rift

In 2026: a Steam Frame

The list is long and varied.

Can't afford: New floors and AC in my house (~$20K)

Can't justify: a XGIMI Aura 3 Max 4K 120Hz UST Projector ($2K)

Can't afford: A camper van (~$60K)

Can't justify: A new PC (~$3500)

One thing I did justify recently was $2K on a new bed. My old bed was over 20 years old.

I thought about the Steam Frame, and can definitely afford it, but I just can’t see enough VR software I’m interested in. I’ve played through HL:A, and most everything else is very short experiences. Or beat saber, which is too fast for me.

An EV. I have a relatively new gas car that is fuel efficient and fully paid off. I work from home so really only use it maximum 3x a week for errands and extra curricular activities. Ironically an EV would be perfect for my use-case.

Upgrade my server/storage. I only have 1.5tb of storage total for everything including my music, shows, etc.

But I am able to manage it, so I can't really justify buying more storage for it when I technically don't need it.

A couple days vacation to go hiking. I haven't had a vacation in years, and I desperately need a break from my life. I'd be thrilled if I could just get on a plane, go across the country and see some mountains for 2-3 days and then come home, but I just can't afford it. Maybe next year, she says, for the 3rd year in a row...

A pair of 20TB HDDs. My NAS is a janky RAID0 setup of a Raspberry Pi and 2x 12TB external WD HDDs that are about 3 years old at this point. I want a backup at this point but there's no way I'm paying for something that ridiculously expensive at the moment.

I also should've gone for at least 32GBs of RAM for my PCs but my cheap ass thought prices would never explode.

A modern PC build. Can’t afford a new GPU or RAM. Mainly so I could actually get some use out of a monitor that isn’t fifteen years old.

A camera for bird watching, a new PC for playing games and VR, a second pad for stepmania, and more thing I can't think of right now.

The thing is that it is not as much that I can't justify those expenses as that the older I get, I realise that I'm fine without them, I don't need any of those things, so I keep postponing them.

I put off buy new hard drives for my NAS. I have an 8 bay and slowly filled it over the years with 6tb drives since they were about $200 at that time. Now that I ran out of that space I started replacing the 6tb one by one with 12tb which at the time was around $200 as well. Ive needed a new HD for years now but couldnt really afford it, but now I really need a new one and I REALLY can't afford it... this hobby is essentially dead at these prices. Ill continue to purge data and hope in a few years some miracle happens and prices drop again. I also hope these current drives hold out without issues...

I wanna go to Japan and do the Saigoku Kannon pilgrimage. D:

Hope you get your steam frame and get to play 40k soon. :)

I have been putting off buying new SSDs to replace internal HDDs that I've had for at least 5 years. They're starting to fill up with crap I've been hoarding over the years and quite frankly, I don't want to pay x3 or x4 times the amount for something I know doesn't cost that much.

It's all just flash NAND. That shit is everywhere. They can't tell me it costs $400 to make one 4TB 'cause I know it doesn't. That's utter BS price fixing.

I'm praying to Primus that my HDDs can outlast this hell hole we're in rn and at least give me the chance to replace just one of them.

Don't even get my started on NAS like Synology. That's a whole different rage bait.

Certain games, for example, Metaphor ReFantazio. Expensive even on sale and the whole "you do not own it despite paying for it" thing. Books and manga; I truly want to purchase a lot of books and manga, but it is just so expensive. Even on sale or secondhand. For example, I would love to purchase: No Game No Life, Smoking Behind the Supermarket, Witch Hat Atelier, and Hey Boy! Let's take a break? Manga/light novels.

Buddy, I think the fact that you forgot the ‘t in your question means you’re asking the exact opposite of what you intend.

Solar everything.

Plenty of things, but the first that came to mind was the same as OP. The Steam Frame looks really cool, but at the price it's a whole thing.

Same for other electronics - a Framework laptop, building a new desktop (good luck to me there), a Steam Deck.

Lots of newer video games. It's easy to turn down some of them, because I know I haven't made time to play a lot of what I already have. Likewise for books in general, where money isn't a bottleneck but time and space are.

Pokemon cards - just recently had a mini-convention day here in town with a bunch of collectors/vendors selling. Made me really want to go back and fill out my weak collection of WotC classics, but the price (vs how much I care) is a bit prohibitive.

Motorcycle. I had my previous one for 17 years and travelled many kilometers with it. However, it has worn down up to the point of the replacement parts being more valuable than what the bike would sell for. In other words, it was a write-off. As I ride my bicycle to work and I have too little leisure time already, I simply cannot justify buying my own motorcycle again.

Fortunately, my FIL has several and will lend me one if I want to.

A Fairphone when I have a fully functioning but old crappy Samsung phone.

I have no disposable income. the list is long. name brand soda. little plastic doodad so it keeps a toilet puck from dissolving in the full tank between flushes. on the high side an electric bike. honestly even when I had income coming in the steam frame is to rich for my blood. I got a steam deck after a year or so when the price decreased and that was when tech part prices went down over time.

Being debt free.

The new Framework Desktop with 192GB unified memory, specifically for LLM inference. I've looked at the numbers and there's no scenario for me in which it's economically sensible to upgrade from 20GB gpu vram + rent EU API inference for larger models. Even if the tokens became more expensive by factor of 10 overnight, by the time the hardware paid for itself it would already long be obsolete.

It's an impressive machine, but I just can't justify the purchase.

A new roof. Our shingle roof is 18 years old and leaking. Which in New Mexico is not the end of the world. But as we have been having rain every other day for 2 weeks, it has become an issue.

There is no way I can afford it right now, so I will have to continuing I patch it.

Get into HAM radio. I have wayyyyyy to much hobbies as is.

My own rocket ship and a yacht that's so big it has another smaller yacht that can fit inside it in case I need to sail into any tight spots.

Nah, just kidding. Could you imagine?

First world problems entirely, but I can't justify any of the below:

A UV printer a metal lathe a 20yr old 2nd hand kit car.

I have big plans to do a performance build on my fun car, a 1977 Cadillac Fleetwood. The old Cadillac big blocks are well known for shitting out good power and torque without much effort and I just want to see this 19 foot land yacht do stupid speeds.
But I do not have the space or equipment yet to be able to do a full engine-out job, and I'm about to move, and I have 14 other projects lined up in front of it (half of which are projects to keep my daily drivers running). So it sits, still a running car but so leaky that I try not to drive it.

A virtual tabletop setup for D&D. A tv cut into a large table with space for players to have some food, drink, their sheets, and dice while putting their minis on an animated map in the center

A piece of land to have a garden. If it's big enough, I could even live there