My husband’s truck is a little 79 Toyota, purchased on CL for $340 two years ago. He’s a great mechanic, he went to scrap yards and loaded up on spare parts. He’ll keep that thing running for years on end. My Nissan truck is 9 yrs old, has 89k miles. I’ll drive it until it’s dead.

We purchased a very vintage 50s small tractor, full of good old American cast iron parts. It came with a rototiller, mower, and hauling wagon. All for $400. Husband has it purring like a kitten. Handles our 4 acres just great.

I use a $6.99 daytimer. It’s small enough to fit comfortably in my purse. I like having the calender in front of me for making appts & work stuff. If I lose it, I won’t be upset like I would if I lost a PDA or other techno device.

Simple and obsolete works for us just fine!

In my family, all our cars have over 150k km and they work fine for us. My little Neon is the least-used at just over 180k, but my mom’s minivan is AMAZING. It’s over 350k (~217k miles) and it still runs OK.

I got my cellphone for my 16th birthday, and I’m now 19. Kind of sad that it’s considered “obsolete” already, but apparently it is. My dad’s was even older, but our cell phone provider replaced it free of charge last year, because when they did some kind of cell phone network update, phones as old as his became incompatible. :)

my celular phones are both 2ndhand, i inherit my parents’ old ones when they upgrade because of their postpaid plan. one is 6 years old, the other is 3 years old, since i only use them for texts and calls they are perfectly fine.

We have 2 televisions–our newer TV is 13 years old. Our 13″ kitchen TV is 23 years old. We do not have cable. We purchased 2 digital converter boxes and rabbit ear antennas so they can pull in the digital signal. It’s seems to working fine. But, we are considering getting a rooftop antenna installed so we can get more stations.

Obviously, we hang on to our obsolete appliances!

All I need to do is add a wireless card, a new battery and maybe a PCMCIA USB 2.0 card and I’ll have a sweet netbook for browsing and typing on when I go out. Not bad for $50 or so.

-Nate

We have no debt and no interest with keeping up with the Jones`.

2) I have an old notebook. With paper.

1. Backup. All you might need to upgrade is the hard drive, but you can set it up with software that can sync it with your PC. I do this myself, and also my dad who runs a business primarily from his PC. If his main system dies, his ‘old’ P4 has all of his all of his current files up to date, and can effectively be used instantly. See ‘Foldershare’ (there’s tons of others). It’s also easy to set it up to view your files remotely.

2. Various storage needs. Again, treating it like a little server that can hold your files for backup or other reasons.

3. Firewalls. Make an industrial strength firewall out of any old box. See ‘pfsense’.

4. Great for learning / kids. If I ever have a child interested in technology, these things are great to clobber and bash around with no real damage being done.

5. PC’s for guests / visitors.

6. Great for grandma / grandpa to get started on for minimal cost.

7. Although Vista and maybe XP might not run great on some of the older boxes, various forms of Linux (which are typically very lightweight) can run great. Ubuntu is free, super-easy to use, and makes for a great backup system or something for the kids.

Lots of ideas and things you can do with older hardware. Granted, not all of these things are everyones interest, but definitely setting up a spare machine with Syncing software / foldershare is extremely important if you run a home based business and can’t afford much downtime. Even with files backed up on a hard drive or USB key, it could potentially be quite a while until you have a ‘working’ system. You can typically run these systems ‘headless’, and just shove them under a desk or in a closet, just as long as they’re attached to your network (wired or wireless).

OK, end geeky talk.

Our cars are a bit obsolete too, but they’re paid for(which is, in my opinion, the best feature a car can possible have!).

I enjoyed the can collecting post you shared a while back and had to share it in my list of 52. Thanks.

(Speaking of old computers, my Mom’s is over 10 years old. My dad has modified it…and it’s crazy slow. But it works just fine for her.)

Thanks for mentioning “Where’s My Money Going?” Month. :) I think approaching things from the spending side vs. the budgeting side periodically gives new insights.