A question of morality: How much can I spend on a bike.

The GT and Mongoose may be better than the others!

Try them out?

If you're handy and got an eye for an electronic bargain you could put together a decent PC for < £700 and get a Meta for around £1500 give or take a £2200 budget. Shop around and you could get it nearer £2000.

You don't need carpet, it's sooo last year.

A half decent new computer costs no more than £500, unless your going to use it to do some serious stuff i.e. gaming, sound engineering, photo editing etc... then you simply don't need the powerfull stuff so don't bother spending any money on it!

How about seeing if you can find an '08 bike around, their numbers are decreasing rapidly now as the new season is in full swing and 09 bikes are everywhere, I got a 2008 dawg supreme for £1800 but equivalent to a bike worth £2500!

i think a key issue here is also............how much can you afford to spend on a bike?

if you would be spending money that you don't have, or should be spending on a more needy cause (ie clothes for your children) then you should consider your budget carefully.

If £2k isn't really going to have an impact on your life then go for it.

It doesn't matter that you might not get everything out of the bike because you're not up to it's standards etc, it's how it makes you feel.

Some people (myself included) just like spending money. I like the feeling I get when all those hours in the office seem worthwhile when I can spank a wad of cash on something I really don't need! (but makes me immensely happy!)

My girlfriend does it too, with shoes! I can't understand how someone can get so excited over a pair of shoes, but she really does, so what ever floats your boat!

Incidentally, I just bought a pair of Super.Fi 5 Pro earphones (which are quite expensive for inner earphones) and they have made such an impact on my life it's unreal! I listen to my ipod for a couple of hours everyday so I decided to take the plunge and get some "proper" earphones, and I can tell you it's worth every penny.

The value of something is measured in many ways, you just need to make sure that you get some value out of your purchase, in any form.

Dazza993 wrote:

I'm not so sure that in 10 years time I'll still have the same zest for it (funnilly enought I'm getting a Zesty!) but anyway I'm convincing myself that spending money also helps to negate the effects of the recession (yes, ideally I'd buy British but a European bike from a UK retailer is as close as I can get)

Well you aren't really helping the UK recession much are you?! A European bike from a UK retailer is nowhere near close as you can get. You can get a UK built frame with quite a few UK built components (though the latter might cost more than 2k) from a UK retailer if you choose to.

fuck the money - buy the bike!!

Go for the bike!

It's what I've just done - Spent ages trying to justify spending thousands on a Blur LT, but I'm not getting any younger, I had enough money, so if not now, when? It's on order and I'm happy

Go mental! Splash out on something lovely, I started out by going for budget stuff but you just end up thinking "I should of bought xxxxx bike" or "I wish my bike was lighter, so I could climb this hill quicker... I just buy whatever I want now. Oh and get an Orange St4, its an amazing bike, and you will be supporting a British company too!

I think I can justify roughly double what my current bike costs. Back when I had a £250 bike I could justify £500, this became £1000 rapidly. Now, they sky's the limit unfortuantely :?

Actually, I don't feel too bad. Although I used a doubling each time formula, I think the missus used a far more beefy quadrupling each time version!

By my calculations, my next bike should be around £4000, hers should be around £7500. Christ, I better get saving.

counterculture - that's an interesting viewpoint. I've just had a little think about how and what I spend my money on and I seem to have done the same thing, without thinking about it.

The saying about paying peanuts and you get monkeys is true, 99.9% of the time. Any time I've bought cheap, it has usually fallen apart (unless we're talking about on-sale items. Buy quality products if you can. And by that, I don't mean over-priced!

It's all about what you really want and when it comes down to expensive bikes the law of dimishing returns,

A £500 bike will be an awful lot better than a £250 bike, a £1000 bike will be quite a lot better than a £500 bike, a £2000 bike will be better than a £1000 bike, but a £3k bike will not be massivley better tha a £2k bike.

You could always consider the 2nd hand slightly used frame option, which is how I came about to now have a Nicolai Helius CC, where the frame cost 1/4 of what they do new (over £1.5k)

go the whole way mate u wont regret it

i went halfway three years ago cos i had at the time but now im ready to really push the boat out with a meta55

personally of the bikes mentioned id go for the 575 or spicy dependant on what u do and want from a bike

enjoy that cash!!!

always spend as much as you can on a bike in the first place, if you dont there is every chance thet you will end up spending loads in th future on upgrades.

also, if you have a pricey bike, you will be cooler and better than most people.