Here’s My Little Pony Starsong wishing everyone enjoy their Happy and Spooky Halloween Celebrations!  Have fun and a good scare!

In my previous few posts, I touched on budgeting for your toy collecting hobby to ride out this financial crisis.  However, it also needs to be complimented by managing our emotions when it comes to toy purchases.  I know that this aspect is easier said than done for many of us tend to be ruled by our emotions rather than logics most of the times.

Using cash payment for your toys is only the first step.  This makes it more ‘painful’ for you to part with your cash so you tend to think twice before any potential impulse purchases.  However to cope with the angel and devil fighting it out in your mind is definitely not easy.  It threatened to mentally ‘tear’ my mind apart on a few occasions when I was faced with indecision on whether to get an impulse toy. 

Now it’s the time to constantly tell yourself to cut down on impulse toy purchases and stay focused on your main collectible toys instead, which should had been the case from the very start of your toy collecting hobby.  The reason why I have so many toys for sale at my online toy store today is because of my straying away from my main collectible toys. 

I got distracted too easily over the years of collecting and ended up with lots of miscellaneous toys in my collections.  Now looking back, I wish I had been more focused and not so impulsive in forking out my hard-earned cash on those extras, which have now become part of the clutter in my home.  Some of these miscellaneous toys also unfortunately deteriorated over the years, which pains my heart. 

Anyway, I now treat it as a lesson learnt.  During the economic boom of the past few years, I tended to splurge on impulse toys, no different from many other people did the same on luxury goods.  The impulse toys were not expensive individually but they added to quite a sum over time. 

In life whatever we do, we must define our goals and remain focused on them at all times.  If not, we end up ‘running all over the place’ and with lots of things we are likely to regret.  I once learnt from a personal development seminar - “how we do anything is how we do everything”. 

Your toy collecting hobby can reveal a lot about your character, the way you think and do things like managing money.  If you find some weaknesses of yourself from there, it’s time to correct yourself before you reach the point of no or difficult return.

The bottomline is: Buy toys that you collect and ignore the rest, regardless of boom or crisis times, discount or not. 

Good luck to you and continue to have fun in toy collecting!

This is a My Little Pony collecting tip that I picked up from the My Little Pony Arena forum:

“Random friendly reminder - Don’t store your ponies wearing anything. (This goes for having them on display for long stretches of time, too; think a half year or longer.)  Some G1 pony shoes, saddles, etc. are known to stain ponies permanently.

I don’t know if any of the G1 cloth outfits ever stained a pony, but I would prefer not to risk it.

Also, I am certain that the newish G3 pony dress-up line of vinyl clothing will likely also leave stain marks - at least, those pieces of clothing that are pink or especially hot pink.

When storing G3 dress-up vinyl clothing, store pink pieces away from pieces of every other color, just to be safe.

Also, remember that ink bleeds onto vinyl.  Keep all vinyl clothing pieces separate and away from things like brochures, stickers, or any printed item like the birthday that that came as an accessory.“

I think the above tips may apply to other toy lines as well.  I don’t own action figures that wear real clothes so I can’t confirm if time will cause the deteriorating clothes to stain the figures.  It’s better to be safe than sorry and check on your clothes-wearing toy collections regularly to take appropriate preventive measures in time. 

Happy toy collecting!

Yesterday, I blogged about the dangers of using credit cards to pay for your purchases during this economic crisis.  Today I shall elaborate more about budgeting and paying for your purchases in cash instead.

Monthly ‘Play’ Budget

For me, I set aside 10% of my monthly income for my ‘Play’ account which is for buying toys, indulging in eating out at places that more expensive than eating at food courts, plus extra clothes, shoes and bags that are not really necessary but happened to appeal to me at the times of purchase.

Budget Allocations

Different people have different budget allocations.  I prefer buying toys and eating to fashion, hence most of my ‘Play’ account goes to toys and food.  I wonder if it is a coincidence that most toy collectors that I have met are the dressed casually in t-shirt and jeans or pants types.  They are hardly the fashionistas types for if they are, they probably won’t have much income left each month to indulge in toys (for being a fashionista is an expensive hobby).

Biaised Expenditures

Many of us are inclined to spending more on certain kinds of things.  I observed that most toy collectors I know are very prudent when it comes to other non-toy expenditures.  Most of them save on furnishing their wardrobes and tend to splurge on toys.  They also tend to use practical possessions like their mobile phones till the gadgets are almost going to break down before changing them.  However, you can get ’shocked’ by the hundreds or even thousands of dollars that these same toy collectors are willing to shell out to get their exclusive toys from online stores, online auctions, local shops etc. 

Cash Payment Is King

It’s best to pay for your toy purchases in cash whenever possible during this financial crisis.  Cash is more ‘painful’ for you to part with each time you take it out from your wallet or from the ATM machine.  This tends to make you think twice before parting with it.  Credit card payment and even NETS payment on the hand, are more like payment with ‘invisible’ cash.  No doubt the payment by NETS is deducted immediately from your account but it’s still ‘invisible’ cash at the point of purchase.  You only see your expenditure when you update your bank passbook or receive the monthly bank statement.

Avoid Super Expensive Toys

Besides paying in cash, avoid collecting the super expensive toys, like those human-sized ones that cost thousands of dollars.  I wonder how many people have the space to keep them at home?  For every one of those ‘giant’-sized toys, you can buy multiples of smaller toys that take up much less space.  However if a toy collector is already at this stage, I know it is more of an emotional thing than a financial one.  The toy addiction has become too great to resist.  Good luck to these expensive toy collectors for only they can help themselves watch their toy expenditures now.

Avoid paying for your toys with credit cards.  Pay in cash or with money that you have.  You may forgo the credit card points for you to potentially redeem some stuff later on but you need to avoid chalking up more credit card expenditures in these hard times. 

The last thing you want to happen is to get into credit card debt now, which can snowball exponentially if you miss paying in full for just one month.  That’s how the banks earn more unnecessary income from you. 

The credit card has long been packaged and marketed by banks as a prestige item where the holders are lead to believe that owning credit cards makes them feel high class and ‘rich’.  To top it all, credit cards have different types to differentiate the super high class holders from the rest.  Not to mention, using a credit card at most merchant outlets these days is super convenient.

Furthermore, most credit cards give the holders credit limits that are about twice (or more) their monthly incomes.  Most holders also own multiple credit cards with similar credit limits.  That is a personal financial disaster in the making because using credit cards encourage the holders to spend way more than they earn, which is absurd if you think of your personal finance like a business. 

From the banks’ perspective, the role of a credit card is to entice holders to spend beyond their means by ‘playing’ on their desires to enjoy the finer things in life like the rich people.  Hopefully when the holders can’t pay in full and just pay the minimum each month, the credit card debt trap is sprung and the horrendous compound interest rates take effect.  In short, that defaulting credit card holder is ‘financially doomed’.

Hence be aware of the financial implications you are getting yourself into right now, not just in toy collecting, but also in the rest of your purchases as well.  Don’t fall into the credit card trap.  If you already have, then you better focus all your attention now to paying it off in full before you buy anything else.  Good luck to you on that.

I read a fellow toy blogger, Kenny’s recent posting about how the current financial crisis is not sparing toy collecting.  So is now a time to buy more or less toys?

If you have been setting aside a monthly ”Play” account like me, you have a few options:

1) Continue to spend within your monthly “Play” account to ’satisfy’ your toy collecting hobby and unceasing craving for more new toys that you collect.

2) Stop buying new toys for now and keep all of your monthly accumulated ”Play” account funds as another form of savings to ride out this financial crisis.  No one knows how long this recession will last.  It may be a year, 3 years or more.  Cash is king now.

3) Spend only half or less from your monthly “Play” account, and roll over the remaining amounts as another form of savings.  To do this, you’ve got to buy your toys at sales and discounts as much as possible. 

4) Cut down on buying “impulse” toys - toys that you obviously don’t collect but you have a tendency to buy them because they look ‘interesting’ at the point of purchase.  Your home will end up looking like a ‘toy shop’ cluttered with all sorts of miscellaneous toys you probably don’t love as much as the main toylines you collect. 

Whatever you buy, avoid using your credit card to pay for your toys and many other expenditures during these difficult times.  I’ll share more about this in tomorrow’s post. 

These are photos that I collected of the 1:24 scale Bburago Lamborghini Reventon.  I couldn’t have taken better shots of my own model than these.  Currently this popular model car costs SGD 22.90 at the departmental stores in Singapore.

I’ve seen this model car in other colors such as white, red, yellow, silver etc. on other websites.  I don’t think those are by Bburago.  However, I find that the Reventon looks best in dark colors such as dark matte grey here, and even in black.  This makes the more angular edges less overwhelming. 

Front View

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This year’s Christmas My Little Pony, aka Winter My Little Pony set has been spotted in the stores of US, Canda and Australia.  I doubt they will be sold in the regular departmental stores here in Singapore. 

We haven’t been getting the Christmas aka Winter ponies since the 2006 batch.  I had to get my 2007 Winter pegasus pony Snow Angel from the US last Christmas.  At least that beautiful pegasus pony was worth importing.

For this 2008 batch of Christmas ponies, the pony characters are repeated once more, as per the current policy of Hasbro’s My Little Pony line where they decided to stop releasing new pony characters.

Luckily I don’t find anything special about these 3 ‘Christmas’ versions of Rainbow Dash, Minty and Pinkie Pie.  Only Minty has some additional paintwork on her but I really dislike that head mold.  It makes her look very matured or even like a stallion.

If you really want to import these ponies to Singapore, you can get them from this online toy store called Entertainment Earth , which also ships internationally.  However,  the stocks are only available next month.  Happy waiting!

Here we have Hasbro’s My Little Pony answer to this year’s Halloween - a pair of repeated pony characters (from left to right: Scootaloo and Starsong) ‘dressed’ in minimum ‘Halloween costumes’. 

I think anyone can provide cute and better looking home-made Halloween costumes for their existing ponies, instead of having to buy these.  Anyway, good luck to Hasbro in pushing the sales of these 2 gals!

This is just another Ponyville pack containing 3 repeated pony characters.  I’ve not seen this pack in our local stores yet but if it does come here, it should cost between SGD 15.00 to 20.00. 

The previous 3-ponies Ponyville pack containg Pinkie Pie, Starsong and Rainbow Dash with no accessories at all, already cost SGD 10.90 here. 

Right now I’m only looking forward to seeing Ponyville Sweetie Belle being released in a single pack, instead of being in a 2-pack or with a hefty playset.