By no longer buying Magic cards on a tri-monthly basis I’ve had a little extra cash to direct towards other things.  I wanted to get a replacement 70-200mm f/2.8 lens for a while as my current one just wasn’t cutting it and about a month ago I started looking for a replacement.  The current Canon lens of that type has very powerful image stabilization but is about $2400 so I was happy to find a used version of the previous generation for $1200.  Attempting to maintain my frugality, I didn’t jump on this immediately thinking it may drop further only to see both copies that were available through lensrentals.com disappear a few days later.  I then saw borrowlenses.com had one for about $1400 and I held off thinking it may drop to what lensrentals.com had been offering.  It too was gone shortly thereafter and eBay was my next source with the lens available at about $1700, $500 above what I had first seen it at.

At this point, I found copies of the newest 70-200 for about $2050 used and bought one at a mere $850 above my initial intended price.  I’ve used the surplus cash I had from Magic…. for all of 2011, and my tax return, and my birthday money.  Buy high, sell low.