Is there such a thing as spending too much on a watch, even if you have the budget and means for it?

I have no moral compunctions given that there is a justification of the price. Changing color* and doubling the price of a "limited edition" is a gyp but Richard Mille is so nutty with their engineering and manufacture for relatively low quantities that I'm willing to believe the cost is not entirely excessive.

My gripe with some top luxury brands is that around half their costs are advertising, promotion, and other things having no tangible effect on the end product. As someone who cares about none of that, they're asking too much.

*I'm sort of aware that any production change racks up all kinds of administrative costs. Going out on the floor and saying "pour some red dye in for the next batch" is basically free, but creating new part numbers and updating that through the whole system, adding it to the website, creating a place to keep the stock and all adds up when there is a small run.

If you want it and it is within your budget then why not have it?

It’s your money, you may spend it any way you see fit.

I’m not sure I see the difference between spending $10,000 on a single watch versus spending $10,000 on multiple watches. It’s still spending about $9,980 more than you need to spend to have a reliable watch on your wrist.

If you are concerned about the morality or inequity of luxury purchases, then the money would be better spent helping the people in those impoverished places rise out of poverty or through charitable giving to provide for their basic needs.

That's exactly it! When I add up all of the money that I've spent over the years, I generally realize that I'm probably not making any rational or consistent sense anyway 🤦🏻‍♂️

You wonder why I like Aragon so much. He spends next nothing on advertising. All those saving are reflected in the price.

So I’ve just made my most expensive watch purchase about a week ago. >50k usd. I thought I needed courage to buy it. Because I’ve never spent so much money on a watch before. But hey it’s well accumulated, hard earned not inherited, responsible (coz the family is well taken care off) and I’m not pretending it’s an investment. Just to give me joy. Now I know many of you have much bigger purchases but what gives me the right to question what is and isn’t right to spend on something you want to spend on. It’s like when I see a rolls Royce on the streets. Instead of thinking what an a$$H0|3, I go wow, there’s no limit to what you can do when you’re successful and inspires me to want it. So I don’t know - whatever works for each one. For me, it doesn’t matter about what anyone else thinks or feels, it’s about how I feel, we’re all in this for ourselves first. So good luck to everyone. Go out there and be the most successful guy with the most expensive watch on your wrist. Happy Journey! And yes do share your journey to inspire others. 😊👍🏼

I agree with @PoorMansRolex that I have no "moral compunction" for limiting what I spend on a given watch, or any other "luxury" item. I think it's more important to be informed about the watches you buy, and know and accept that you believe the price is worth the watch. There are some insane prices in this industry, both high and low. It's the incredible variety of the product that is so enticing, and in the case of some of the higher prices, is because these watches represent the pinnacle of human endeavor, in both engineering and artistry.

I've recently started listening to the "Love n Watches" podcast (highly recommend), and they have a great saying. "Buy what you love, and love what you buy." Beyond that I think there really are no rules for "how much" you should spend. (I don't think anyone should ever finance a watch) I have resolved myself to the fact that there is a sector of this hobby that is "out of reach" and will forever be, but I still love to look! The amazing thing I discovered is that the sector within my reach is far greater than I ever knew, and full of incredible watches that are well within any limit I have set for my own spending.

Cheers,

Mike

>50k usd

From context, I think you mean <, less than.

My opinion is that it depends very much on income and lifestyle. What you can technically afford plus who you are going to be around.

The guy who makes $500K a year as a corporate lawyer, goes to charity events, has a golf club membership and box seats for football games makes sense to wear $40-100k watches if he likes them. Even if he isn't into watches, he likely has one nice peice to fit in

People who make $50-100K a year can afford $10-15K watches. They also might go to restaurants and parties, work with people who also wear nice watches. Not saying one must, just that makes sense

However, if you make $30-40K a year something in the $3-5K range is reasonable.

Of course, someone can save, trade up, sacrifice vacation time to buy a more expensive watch. Or someone who makes a million a year could absolutely love Seiko. There are no rules, just a safe guideline for affordable

For me it depends on comfort level. When i first started with the hobby i was very very uncomfortable spending more than $200 on a watch, even if i had the means to go higher. It seems the longer i am in the hobby the higher my comfort zone has crept up. Right now around $5k is comfortable with $10k being my upper limit. I cannot fathom myself spending a car or house worth of money on one watch. Not yet anyway.

Truth is, men want to wear jewellery too. And watches, along with rings and cuff links are the most widely acceptable forms of bling a man can (and sometimes expected to) wear.

So yes, it's no surprise we'd wear thousands of dollars wrapped on our wrist and we have a box of different ones waiting their turn at home. As some posters said above, it's a normal thing to wear expensive watches. As long as you don't go into hock or become the second coming of Heisenberg (or worse, Gus Fring) just to buy a watch, wear your watches to your heart's delight.

This comes up regularly on this forum, and my answer's the same... it's all relative. A $500 watch to a bottom-tier, blue collar worker, who had to save for 6 months to buy it, is like gold. A $10,000 watch to a multi-millionaire is nothing; it's just an object they picked up, like many others in their life. So how we interpret these costs is extremely relative, and different for everyone. I could give you my 'cut off' number, but what would it mean? Not much. Just that it's smaller than some people's, and greater than other people's.

I never feel comfortable spending above $1k; that’s my mortgage payment and car payment for the month. There are occasions where I’d break my limit, but those instances are few and far between (2-4 years).

🙂 no I meant more than. My first watch that cost me more than 50k usd brand new.

As I replied to her video; of you have a perfectly good $100 Seiko/Timex/Casio that you're happy with, then a $500 Hamilton is a luxury.

I think you're onto something! I love the genius of Coca-Cola going "luxury beverage" based on their heritage (over 130 years old!), iconic design (Raymond Loewy designed our glass bottle! We designed Santa Claus!), historic celebrity endorsements (Elvis! Otis Redding! Taylor Swift! LeBron!...the list is endless), and, yes, NASA and Coke even developed a Coke can for consumption by astronauts on the Space Shuttle! They're already cranking out limited-editions at near-Seiko levels, so all they have to do to compete with the Swiss is limit production, move distribution to a small number of Cola Boutiques, stamp "Bottled in Atlanta" on everything regardless of where the ingredients come from, and start charging $100 a can. I look forward to Sodinkee's review of the World Cup sponsorship can where they make the case that the $250 cola (I mean, you have to understand the value proposition here due to the limited nature of the can design) is the ideal drink for serious soccer players due to the in-house recipe's mix of sugar, water, and caffeine. Sure, people in the comments will complain that the barcode placement throws off the symmetry of the can and that the tabs on the top are misaligned, but they're just haters and Pepsi fanboys who are really just mad that they can't afford a "real" cola.

Wow, just wow. You know what they say, if you got nothing nice to say about the working man, maybe try to say nothing.

Yep, that was an instant block.

If you think I am speaking against the workers, you have misread or misunderstood.

Luxury all depends on the individuals time of life and financial position they are looking at it from . Simples

@bipennate I'm sorry. I realized that I answered your question without reading the whole thing--simply saw the headline and the poll in my WC feed and reacted with some general thoughts on the cost of watches that didn't address what you were actually asking. Having read your entire post, it's a thoughtful and important question and one that resonates deeply with me.

I didn't grow up with money and I'm very sensitive to how it makes someone who's genuinely struggling feel when wealth is casually flaunted in front of them. I've managed to obtain a degree of success and financial stability but I still have friends and family who have been homeless and remain on the brink and like most of us, live in a city/state/country where poverty is rampant and visible. I still feel connected to it and I can't say I've made peace with my occasional indulgences—they're usually followed by some guilt and reactive rationalization commensurate with the amount and selfishness of the spend. In a way, I'm glad this is a struggle. I never want to be so disconnected from humanity that I don't contemplate what it means to spend potentially life-changing money for someone else on a luxury that only makes me feel good.

As it relates to your question, these feelings absolutely inform what I buy and, importantly, when I wear it. That's not to say I haven't bought expensive watches, but they've tended to be brands that folks outside the hobby wouldn't recognize or associate with a high price tag. The couple of watches I do have by more recognizable luxury brands I wear rarely and discreetly. I definitely have a price-cap for what I'd spend on a watch, but for me I think more about the perception of what I'm spending as much as the reality of it: Basically, if someone took me to Watches Of Switzerland and said I could take home any watch I wanted for free (and, crucially, I couldn't turn around and sell it), I'm the guy who'd walk out with a five-figure Seiko on my wrist without even stopping to browse the Rolex, Patek, or Vacheron cases.

I am of 2 minds on this.

First, I totally understand the emotional reaction when realizing you are literally wearing someone annual income on your wrist. And, let's be frank, it's not even that useful (especially in this days and age of smartphone and smartwatches and whatnot). It feels weird and wasteful. It feels borderline immoral.

And it's not just about the percentage of the wearer income. If every Rolex wearer wears Timex and donates the difference to charity, we might be able to eradicate hunger. Right?

On the other hand, though, isn't this kind of waste the foundation of Western economic miracle? I mean, beside the direct addition to GDP (and think about it, the few thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, through the power of the market, circulate round and round to bring fourth even more economics growth), these things also contribute to the technological foundation upon with the economy thrive. Think about the silicon production method. Today balance spring, tomorrow aviation parts? Or take Citizen titanium finishing, which literally makes it easier to explore the space. Often times, things ain't so clear cut. But the same technical foundation of watchmaking and decoration support many other, much more life-and-death industries.

At the end of the days, I love these little expensive things, so maybe it's all excuses. But I do think having the moral impulse of restrain from time to time is part of what makes us human.

$10k is the highest I could do when I was building my collection, and I have no regrets. Yes, I would like a watch in full gold. That’s probably a future “grail”. But there’s so many fantastic watches under $10k, I really don’t think you have to go above that to have a truly satisfying collection.

No worries at all! I think that the perspective of have and have-not is applicable here, for sure. We're all discussing the values of luxury goods, but I think that the concept of a "luxury" misses the mark if we define it by the purchases that we make and not what it actually represents, as you allude to.

The luxury isn't the watch, it's the luxury of being able to afford a purchase without the accompanying burden that such a purchase might cause. Luxury in my mind is just that: the absence of burden. For many of us, purchases come with sacrifice, even if we have the means to make the purchase. Do I buy a $10k watch if it means that I can't put food on the table? Of course not, that's foolish. But what if it's not a matter of food and shelter, but instead of the watch, I took that money and invested it? Would that impact my ability to retire? Or perhaps I instead invested it for my children? My oldest daughter is 5, in 55 years, that $10k could - hypothetically - by worth half a million dollars for her own retirement. Now does it make me rethink my purchases?

In other words, most of us at some point need to decide "if this, then not that."

But that's the thing, in my mind: true luxury means that I am in a position where such a purchase would not have a meaningful impact on my current or future abilities. In an extreme example, Bill Gates makes our hypothetical $10k in a little over ten minutes of every hour of every day. He could buy a million dollar watch without a moment of hesitation and with no impact of burden whatsoever.

Whatever that amount is for an individual - the amount that a person could spend without that having any impact on lifestyle, health or shelter as well as any future needs of lifestyle, health or shelter - that defines luxury for them, and how they might vote on this poll.

That's what I think, anyway.

Yeah--the moment you describe when you realized you were wearing someone's salary on your wrist is what struck me. The issue of "what else can I be doing with this money?" is always a factor, whether it's a watch, a vacation, or an old record I want, but with a watch it hits me a bit harder because they're ultimately kinda useless (and, in our stupid hobby, the more useless the watch, the more it costs) and act as visible status symbols whether we want them to be or not. I wouldn't call a friend who's out of work and unable to pay his bills to tell him that I just bought a $10,000 turntable and there's part of me that thinks I'd be wordlessly doing exactly that if I had a Rolex on my wrist while interacting with him or even strangers who are barely getting by. There's a humility I don't want to lose touch with that way. No matter how much I can afford to spend without questioning its impact on my personal finances, there's a part of me that I hope never loses sight of what that money would mean to someone less fortunate.

It is different for different people and I think that's ok.

So, I've been thinking about this a bit more. There is a group called "give directly" that has not only been providing charitable donations to areas of extreme poverty, they have researched the effects of this. It would seem that, in fact, these large charitable donations enable quite a bit of improvement in QoL and opportunity for improvements in investment and wealth generation, as evidence here:

https://www.givedirectly.org/research-at-give-directly/

Yeah Simon B! And the advertising he does have, which is simply a short video of his latest creation, is great because he can't wait to show us what he's cooked up next, and he's so enthusiastic about it.

For those who have not scoped out Aragon, here are other reasons to like them, other than great prices.

-Original designs, all by just one man, Wing Liang

- Bold watches. No subtlety at all but somehow he gets away with it.

-Big watches with jaw-dropping dials and colors. On his videos, Wing just looks like a regular size guy but he has no problem wearing his 45 and even 50mm watches.

-High quality materials and tank-like build.

So well said,👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾

Hello. I relate, and especially to your second paragraph "I didn't grow up with money . . ."

Both of my parents grew up in the heart of the Great Depression and then both of their families were devastated by the 1937 flood. They raised seven of us and every one of us has achieved some success, but my hometown is now also ravaged with rampant and visible poverty. But nobody's hungry, or they shouldn't be. I've been making food and other help visits for my church since 2017. The food resources are everywhere. There are jobs everywhere for the taking. There are no less than 14 churches in our 9 block "neighborhood" if anyone wants to go to them.

We can handle most of these material problems, although homelessness still fills us with dread. This has nothing to do with money, because we can raise the $$$ to help people, but it sure seems like every single house and apartment in the city already has somebody living in it.

But the worse problem, and after six years pretty much the only one I care about, is spiritual poverty. It's now a baby daddy city. In six years of home visits, I can count on one hand the number of husband-wife households. There are now 9 Sober Living houses in our little neighborhood, rapidly catching up to the 14 churches. It figures. When you have no meaningful work, nothing to sacrifice for, and no spiritual connection, why wouldn't you take drugs?

So we visit, we pray, and we show the list of churches to our people. We ask them to connect or reconnect with God, to connect or reconnect with the neighbors on their street, and with family and friends, instead of putting much faith in dumb politicians and mad scientists who have made a pretty big mess of our city the last few years. And we still bring physical food and clothing. But if that was all I was doing, I would quit. Because then I would only be like the Amazon driver, except everything is free.

I have 33 watches and no false guilt or "Catholic guilt" whatsoever. Or real guilt for that matter. And if I did, I wouldn't be worried about it. Real guilt is one of God's greatest gifts. If everyone had a finely developed sense of guilt, it would be impossible to treat anybody badly, because your sense of guilt would kick in, and you wouldn't do it. Your city wouldn't even need police, because everyone would be policing themselves. I have given a few of my watches away to the Fall Church Festivals and Vietnam Veterans, but it has nothing to do with guilt.

I also wear my watches discreetly. My most expensive one was $180, but most of them, like my glorious silver dial $125 Tissot Everytime Large look like they cost many times that. So on home visits it's usually my little Alba field watch or my Casio digital, or my Wenger diver. After a whole day of dealing with five or six misfortune/dysfunction scenarios, it's good to come home and devote a little time to something that engages you. The operative phrase is a "little time". Come home, recharge, spend a little time with Seiko, Casio, Citizen, Aragon, etc. and get in a good frame of mind to leave the house tomorrow.

I have been in homes where people asked for help who have still managed to collect things like pets, yarn, and sports memorabilia. And it might be a bit of a stretch, but I think people who don't want to collect things also experience a sort of poverty.