Paying rent, mortgage, spending time with the wife and kids, and disappearing at odd hours for indefinite amounts of time. Just like any good old fashioned destructive, addictive behavior .

Floor space.

Definitely space in the uk where things are just smaller then the states, typically no big garages unless in quite a big house / no basements. So gotta stick em in spare rooms!

Prices for games here in Australia keep going up
The last guy i delt with tried to charge an arm and a leg
Luckily i was able to negotiate

Every girlfriend i have had since owning pins has had a dig at me for having my dining room as a pinball parlour.... Now I only have the pins.

Glad you are good at bargaining and kept a cool head Pete

Gave up my annual ski trip to Aspen CO this year. Have gone every year for the past 10. Was upset to miss it. But that wasn’t really for pinball. That was for buying and renovating a house, so I had room for more pinball... lol

401k or lack depth thereof.
Enjoy your day !
Shane

With the prices these days, going to have to lose a kidney. Even a Party Zone is for sale for 3K.

Early retirement? Every pin you buy now means something like $50k less in retirement funds in 20-30 years compared to investing that money and having it work for you for those years. I think about that every time I'm looking at making a big purchase. I could afford about 75 pins, but I only have 3. Trying to find the balance between being too frugal and still enjoying life is an ongoing battle.

I have an addictive personality and really bad OCD so luckily for me, I sacrificed GAMBLING and DRINKING and use restoring pins to keep my mind off of cravings and not fall back into it. I seem to only have problems when I'm in between projects.

I think this is the best post thus far! Keep at it and enjoy those pins!

Good for you! I’m taking the month off as an experiment and focusing on my playing/technique. A week in and I’ve already seen a huge improvement in my scores. Sleeping better, more energy... may just end up rolling with it when the month is up!

I gave up a 2 week trip to Greece, including flight, hotel, meals, and even some entertainment paid for.

So... I may be in the minority here but my 4 pin collection costs me on average about $100 a month, about the same price as cable. I'm not buying NIB pins and as such, keeping them for a few months then selling them costs me almost nothing. I did the math and between the dozen machines I've had in the past year and a half they are worth about $2,000 less than I have in them, mostly due to a poor Hobbit purchase decision. Yeah I could have that money in the stock market doing better, but owning machines doesn't really cost a lot. I have bought one NIB pin, and that is my Rick and Morty that I have delusions will keep it's value or appreciate.

My main sacrifices have been related to time invested vs. doing other things... in other words, opportunity costs. I have actually shifted from buying the pin I really want to trading for "the best offer" on machines that I sell/trade and have done really well with that. It has also resulted in a much lower time commitiment as people are coming to me. My current lineup is a ST:TNG (my first forever pin, wife loves it), Whirlwind, High Speed, and Taxi with money in the bank ready to go from trades for my Rick and Morty.

If you just buy NIB pins and sell them every 6 months you will lose your butt in this hobby. If you buy the year olds or decades olds, you'll do just fine. YMMV.

That's a good meatball.

I sacrificed early retirement to keep buying pinball machines. I think the hobby is the best it has ever been for machine choices and I want to enjoy it while I can. I stopped smoking to help pay for the games too.

See, this is where getting older comes in handy. There's no more "20-30 years" to consider. And the balance is more towards enjoying life, not being frugal. You only die once.

That being said, it's hard to say what I may have "sacrificed". I could have done/bought a million different things with the money I spent on pins, but nothing I couldn't live without, apparently, so was it really a "sacrifice"?

I'm getting closer to there. If you're retired and have enough saved to meet your basic needs the rest of your life, then absolutely spend your excess dollars on pinball or anything else that makes you happy. I just don't want to spend thousands of extra hours working just to buy expensive toys that mostly sit in a dark room collecting dust. I'd rather retire at 45 and spend my golden years on the golf course or reading books than retire at 65 with a house full of pins. The best of both worlds would be 45 with a house full of pins to play at night after getting home from the golf course

You traded one drug for another

I do a sacrifice, before every NIB.

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I had been saving for a grail pin the past 16 months, then my daughter turned 16 and got a job. A few months later her car died and needed to be replaced...so my grail pin turned into a Prius...

Back to saving!

was coming here to say something similar

I used to be a pretty avid golfer and used to play a lot of video games and poker, but my priorities have shifted to pinball in the past 16 years I've been in the hobby. You only have so much time in a day, and pinball consumes a lot of time between playing, working on games, and socializing at league and tournaments. Financially it was one of the best decisions I've made in life. I paid for a good chunk of my current collection through buying and selling over the years' and at least have equity in my current games to show for it. I would have spent way more golfing or doing other hobbies and at least pinball keeps you around the house (and kids) more vs. something like golf or gambling. The money I've spent on pinball is peanuts compared to the amount of entertainment and knowledge I've gained from it. If I don't retire early it won't be won't be because of pinball or a hobby, but because of having 3 kids. The money I spend on daycare alone dwarfs the money spent on pinball and entertainment.

TIME and lots of it

she will only 16 once man, priorities.

Was that Gary?

My life.

LTG : )

Pinball is the best drug I have ever had.

Yep- I didn't hesitate in the making of that decision...

Besides the obvious ones (time, space, sanity, etc) my biggest sacrifice was my old M:tG collection. I worked in a comic book store back in the day and between that and competitive play I had thousands of dollars in cardboard. In reality I traded one hobby for another. I don't feel too bad about it, as long as I don't check card prices. I have gotten a ton more enjoyment out of the pins in the front room than the stack of moxen they used to be. Double bonus, my father loves to help with the machines I have routed, so I get to work on that relationship.

-Doug

I was wondering the same thing...

Raven??

I gave up watching Hallmark movies in the evenings with my wife so i can play some pinball.

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People looking at me as normal.

I often wonder what I would be spending this money on instead of pinball. Would I have this "equity" sitting in some other form? I used to mod cars before doing pinball (and let's be 100% honest here, kids). Would I still be doing that now? Video games? All I know is that I don't think I would have anything to show for it, even in the bank account. It would probably be spent on other (wasteful?) things.

Hookers and blow.

Glad you chose pinball.

LTG : )

My liver.

That's why you get the Hooker, for the blow....

i wonder the same thing - it would just be slowly draining away on dinners, little bills and things around the house. When I sell a pin, the money goes in a drawer so I can jump on something else any time or day of the week. If I sell a game for 3k, invariably there's only 2500.00 left after a while. I slip a hundred into my daughters purse when she visits from Florida, need to get away for a weekend and grab a couple off the stack, etc. I doubt I'd be putting extra into an account someplace.

Honestly I havent touched a game in a long time and am pondering selling half of them. I've just gotten into settling down after work and reading good books and have a stack of probably 20 on deck next to 20 that are already finished. I probably read 3 or 4 hours a night now. My pin interest has been gradually sliding the past couple years, from dropping out of my local league to just not even playing at home anymore. At least not enough to warrant having 20+ games.

Even with the amazing collection you have I think we have all gone through that phase. Currently we Love when family and friends come over watching them enjoy the arcade but the days of going down every night have slowly dissipated. My wife does the book a day adventure. Buying here a Kindle was the best money I spent in Years. lol

Talk about amazing collections - dang, son!
And yeah, hopefully just a case of the ho-hums right now.