Your best bargain purchase?
 

Well, two months ago I bought an 1600 pages Japanese Kanji to English Dictionary worth 8500 yen for only $5. My japenese teacher and my class mate said I was damn lucky, and indeed, It's worth at least $47 in eBay.

Anyway guys, what is your best bargain purchase in your history? Have you bought something very valuable with extraordinarily cheap price before?

I've been on the lookout for some deals before; what the "best" are depend on if you count relative price or absolute price.

A few highlights:

• I got a used Playstation with copies of Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete, Vagrant Story, and a pile of other rare and valuable RPGs for $5
• I got a set of TI-89s and TI-89 Titaniums off local college classifieds for under $20 which I proceeded to resell above $60
• My primary Trumpet, worth at least $1900, I got for $1300 in near-mint condition used.
• My current Laptop - Dell Latitude D620, 1.66Ghz C2D, 2GB RAM, Warranty, the works - which I got for $500. Tough to place an actual value on it at the moment since everything fluctuates so much, but for a name-brand top-quality machine still under warranty, I consider it a steal.

I'm sure there's plenty of others I'm forgetting too.

I will still never get over these.

-Final Fantasy Chronicles (Chrono Trigger and Final Fatnasy IV) for $8
-Final Fatnasy Anthology (Final Fantasy V and IV) for $8
-Super Mario RPG (Super NES cart) for $5
-An estimated 600 dollars worth of Magic cards for $70
-Entire series of Firefly for $16

I also frequent a second hand media store that sells DVDs starting at 5 bucks, and going no higher than 25 for individual DVDs. I've found some real gems for under 10 dollars there.

I'm sure there have been other notable purchases in my history, but those are the ones that come to mind.

I got a £400 Stone Island jacket for £30 on eBay. It's quite clearly stolen but it is genuine. They each have a unique serial number and I checked it. New Year's Eve is the time to check eBay as a lot of people will put unwanted Christmas gifts on eBay on Christmas evening, meaning the auction runs out New Years Eve when a lot of people are out partying.

RE4 for $4.85, thanks to a gift certificate.
3 Godzilla movies (although I didn't want one of them) in a boxset for $30. Just one movie alone would've cost $30!

I don't usually get much bargains, alas.

Vaio laptop with Blu ray worth £860 I have just gotten on ebay for £630, which is great, 2 months old MINT but comes with the 1 year warranty. Just waiting for it to come anyday now.

Some rare FFX tinned choclate with Tidus and another with Yuna at the front for £3. An FF8 character boxset I got for £5 I saw go for £66 the other day on Ebay so I'll probably be selling that.

When I was a youngun, I found Suikoden II for $8. Pawn shop, slightly sketchy, but who wouldn't turn that down?:cool:

http://tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:.../ripstick1.jpg

I just bought one of these on eBay for around $48. They go for $70 to $100 at Wal Mart and Amazon.

You all think you got good deals, huh? Ha! You frugal and observant shoppers have more to learn.

None of that approaches this:

http://a4.vox.com/6a00b8ea07533e1bc0...c9f43c7f-500pi

The Mr. Methane CD, purchased over ebay for .01¢. Yeah, free shipping. This guy performs all sorts of neat stuff, including the doot doot, doot doot from the Blue Danube.

Allow me to share a track from this CD. Here ya go.

O_O
I think you basically got this for free, sir

Yep, just about.

But I did pay for it, a whole penny. Therefore, this was a real transaction and thus may be considered a bargain. Actually, now that I think about it, at the time of the purchase I got the subtle feeling the seller was eager to get rid of it (could it possibly be?). Still a pretty good bargain, eh?

I think he should have paid you .01¢ instead. :(

I see. Perhaps you're all correct on the matter. :(

But it is sad indeed to see such diminished interest in good potty humor. It is fantastic thing; much usefulness and intelligence can be created from it, and I believe that one day it will have ability to heal the inhumanities of the earth.

Anyways, this is a fun thread, and back to topic, Arainach and Helloween, congrats on the scoring those games. I see Suikoden II going on ebay consistently for around $80.

I got Street Fighter II V the complete series for $30 when it still had a retail of like $70. I also got all of Blue Seed far below retail price. Looking at it now though, I'd say that anime was just normally overpriced more then me getting a bargain.

I don't know if many would consider this the deal of the century, but my dad just recently purchased a Thinkpad laptop, about 8 years old at a garage sale for 10 bucks. My sister used it for a while, and even managed to MSN to work on it. I think it only had like a 5 gigabyte hard drive so there wasn't much else that could be done on it. Nevertheless, I think that if you can get any piece of technology for under 10 bucks, there's no use complaining.
As for me, I don't know if this counts, but I work at a sporting goods store, so I get anything in the store at the cost price plus 10%. Anything.
I've gotten $100 runners for $40, snowboard bindings, name brand hoodies and a ski package for $50, 20$ and $180, respectively.

Hm, some good deals I had were:

Three Tombstone Pizza's for 5 bucks. Many times it costs four to five bucks for ONE Tombstone Pizza.
WWE:DOR 1, Madden 05 (or 04?), NHL 05 (or 04?), Sega Soccer, Baiten Kaitos, and Legends of Wrestling II all for five bucks via Circuit City.
Several used video game guides, two bucks each, in which if I bought two, I got a third, used guide free.
Some four gig memsticks for 35 to 40 bucks when they were running something like 80.

I bought a lot of cheap jewelry in Mexico but that's not saying much :(

Best thing I ever bought was at my community's giant annual garage sale. When I was 13 (I think) I'd spotted some old gameboy games (tetris, bobble bobble, pokemon blue) and asked for a price but the guy just gave them to me for dollar since they hadn't sold yet at all.

for some reason I couldn't but helplessly amused when reading this conversation. Mind if I put this on my signature for a while later on, kind sirs?:tpg:

Not too long ago I got the newer model of Canon's 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM lens for $375 used, but mint. Used the lens for a bit, then proceeded to sell for $550 :). Retail value is $749.99 here in Canada.

I find comparing used items to retail values to be pretty useless though, seems to be more of a justification to help with buyers remorse afterwards. Same goes for "theoretical values" on cards games and the such.

I am quite glad to provide amusement, so it would be fine by me, eriol. I think there's a little bit more after Forsety's comment and I posted a sendspace link to one of the tracks in the "Here ya go" part of the first post, if you'd be interested in including it. :p

2006 CRC chemistry & phycsics - 15$ from a hole in the wall used book place

usually iike 200 for even the student edition

About 3 years ago I was at a book fair and they had my prescribed texts for foundation studies (physics and math methods) for $15 each..all in new and mint condition! The retail price was about $120-150 that time... I already had mine but nevertheless I bought all that was available and sold it to new students at close to the retail price (about $80/book) :D That's something I won't forget for a while..

I remember I did have some good deals when I was younger but I can't recall now..

I bought a book worth at least £20 for 50p at one point, but then I got roped into one of those crappy book deals so I guess that isn't a true bargain >.> There's a lot of stuff on eBay that I would have saved a fortune on had people not put the postage up so high. I've got a pocketwatch that I paid £7.50 in total for though.

A friend of mine bought a set of ornamental glass jug/jar things that were well worth over £100 for £10. The detail was exquisite. Putting them in a room where he was going to be swinging nunchakus didn't seem like such a good idea though.

I get some pretty good deals on the mispelled ebay page. It searches for mispelled items that wouldn't show up on a properly spelled search on ebay. People don't find these mispelled items, and so there are never any bids on them. I got a sony 2gb mp3 player for $5 dollars because someone spelled it m3p palyer. No one had bid on it so I placed a $5 dollar bid, and when the time expired, the person had to sell it to me for that price. I was pretty thrilled.

wow, I gotta admit that's very lucky of you. But wow, never thought typo could bring some great deal in ebay though! *gonna try this in future* :D