OhLook wrote in post #16329917
By what I take to be your criteria for investment, paying the bill is an investment whose return is the availability of water next month and the absence of a bad mark on one's credit rating.
It's more a question of if you want to see it as a luxury.
Remember that once people had the toilet outside. So getting a water closet inside represented a large improvement in living standards. Today, it is just a regular cost to pay for consumed water but you still have people in the western world who may have a summer cabin where availability of running water inside would represent a bit of additional luxury.
Only if you watch enough programs during the billing period and they really improve your life. (We don't have cable. I'd rather use my time in other ways.)
It really would be totally open to anyone to decide what "enough" would be. I wouldn't see it as an investment for someone who just needs to have a wall of sound around them whenever they are home, but someone who loves old movies could definitely see it as an investment in luxury to have access to lots and lots of old movies to watch.
In the short term, buying food in the morning is an investment whose payoff comes at dinner that evening. In the long term, well, try not buying food for the day every day and see how much future you get.
It really isn't too many in the western world who would really see food on the table as some form of investment. We just can't survive without food so paying for food is just "paying the bills". But consider saving up for a nice restaurang visit on your wedding day - that could definitely be seen an investment. Both in luxury food and in collecting a couple of "cookie points" for other times when work might make you come home too late to have time to be social.
I don't know, using the timing of payment to divide investments from mere purchases just seems specious. I can pay in advance to have a weekly magazine delivered for a year, or I can buy an issue on the newsstand every week. Does that make one method of payment "investing" and the other not?
The whole point of this is that the term "investment" really allows for a very wide view. It is way larger than just "future monetary gain", and it is very subjective what we may decide to see as an investment. But in my view, you need some form of future gain. Which could be the joy of knowing that you will get new interesting magazines to read for the next year. But take a rose? In that case you could buy it now, but with the intention that you might score some relationship points for a couple of days. So the concept - in my view - isn't when you pay but what potential future gain you can see.
If you are about to do a job interview tomorrow and see a suitable magazine in the news rack that just seem to contain valuable information that could help you tomorrow, then you could see it as an investment to pick it up - just hoping your interview would go better. In that specific case, you might hope for an actual economic gain from buying the magazine.
About to go on a date, and you know that the other part is very interested in hobby xxx? So maybe spend time reading up a bit about that hobby...
So in my view, the sky is the limit for what I could see as an investment. It's just a question of what future advantages do I hope to see. Maybe that flower gets me a hug - that's enough to make it a valid investment.
