nonemoreblack wrote: ↑Thu Mar 11, 2021 3:32 pm
One of my biggest gear regrets was passing on a 1961 Olympic white jazzmaster for $900 CAN back in the mid-90’s. I was a teenager buying my first good guitar so I ending up going with the brand-new MIJ Jaguar next to it because it was only $800. I had spent all summer pushing wheelbarrows to save up for an offset and the last thing I wanted to do was get an old dinged-up guitar.
Oh well, probably should have bought stock in Apple back then too.
This is exactly the right attitude (the part I bolded), which is to accept that none of us has a crystal ball. You could have skipped the guitar and bought $1000 of Amazon stock in 1997 and you'd have $1.8M today instead of either guitar, so there are much greater "missed opportunities" than passing over a guitar that went up in value tenfold in a quarter century if you want to indulge those thought processes.
Buy whichever guitar you enjoy right now that you can afford with however much money you have right now. We all win some and lose some. I've made some money selling guitars that happened to go up in value, but in 10 years I will probably look back and think, "if only I know we were heading toward $10k Mustangs!"
But I'm not hoarding guitars as investments. I bought them because I liked them, situations changed, and it made sense to sell them when I did.
Sure, it sucks that vintage guitars are becoming inaccessible, but to be honest, who really cares? We live in an absolute golden era where more amazing guitars are available at more price points than ever before. I had an original Classic Vibe strat I picked up used for $200, and frankly, with a set of noiseless pickups, I could have used that guitar as my only electric I owned for the rest of my life, and I'd never have been held back by anything.
There was a dark time where vintage Fenders and Gibsons were the highest quality guitars of that style at any price point when they were hundreds as opposed to tens of thousands of dollars. We can appreciate what made those instruments special and dream about owning them, but we have access to so many instruments that do the same things for so much less money now. If I hadn't been able to buy a couple of vintage offsets when I did, my life wouldn't be turning out any differently right now.
The artist formerly known as mbene085.