First payday that was actually real money — what did you spend it on

Cleaning out a drawer tonight and found the receipt for a pair of headphones I bought in 2016 with my first month that cleared four figures.

340 quid on headphones. I remember standing in the shop for about twenty minutes because it felt insane, and then buying them, and then not being able to tell anybody why it mattered. Still got them. Left earcup is held on with tape.

So - first payday that was actually real to you. Not your best month, the first one that felt like the thing had worked. What did you buy and do you still have it?

a mechanical keyboard and then i immediately put the rest back into ad spend and lost it all in nine days. still got the keyboard!!

paid my mum's council tax. she never asked where it came from and i never said

That's the only good answer anyone will post in this thread and it arrived third.

That's the thread over then. Four posts in.

My friend, i buy a chair. Actually a proper chair, the expensive kind, because i was working from a kitchen chair for two years and my back was destroyed.

Everybody laugh at me at the time. But is eight years now in the same chair and is the only thing i own that i would buy again immediately. The rest of that month i spend on nothing i can remember.

Chair is correct answer. Everything else you buy is for other people to see.

havent had one yet. reading this like a menu

A flight home, at short notice, in the middle of the week, without looking at the price.

That was the thing that made it real for me — not owning something, but the fact that a bad phone call on a Tuesday no longer meant a nine-hour bus.

Still the purchase I'd point at if someone asked what any of this was for.

Same category for me. I paid off the last of a family loan that had been sitting there for six years and nobody had mentioned in four.

The strange part was how little happened afterwards. I expected a moment and got a bank confirmation screen. It only landed properly about a month later.

I still have the spreadsheet, which tells you everything about me.

First month over 5k was March 2020. What I did with it:

Back into spend	3,100
Rent	900
A monitor	420
Untouched	580

The monitor died in 2023. The 580 is still, in a sense, the same 580 — it became the float I've never let drop below a number since, and it's the only reason I survived two networks going down.

So the best thing I bought that month was not spending it.

he made a table. in the lounge

the best thing you bought was not spending it. i'm going to think about that

bought eth with all of it in 2017 and sold it in 2018 for less than i paid. no object, no story, just a lesson

I set aside the tax on it before I spent a penny, which I appreciate is the least popular sentence on this board.

In my defence the reason I did it is not virtue. I had spent nine years watching other people's businesses fail and a meaningful proportion of them failed in the specific month a bill arrived that they had already spent.

The thing I actually bought, once that was done, was a very good coat. I still wear it.