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Resale Value of Digital Pianos Digital pianos in this century actually tend to have a higher resale valued than a comparably priced acoustic piano for several simple reasons. There are many used acoustic pianos available for sale at any given point. However, it is difficult to find used digital pianos. (editor’s note: Perhaps because people actually learn to play because of the interactive learning software and special digital piano learning features!). Also, since digital pianos are so popular in today’s world, people are always looking for a used one which drives up the price of the very few that you can find. We would be glad to buy them or take them on trade or consignment whenever possible. Want a more in depth explanation because you’ve heard the contrary? Maybe a friend, family member, or an acoustic piano salesperson points out that an acoustic piano is an investment or that an acoustic piano will have a better resale value. Some of this may be true but that is not the whole story. The other part of the story that is not mentioned is a huge financial loss! First, any piano, whether acoustic or digital, will have the most depreciation for the first one to five years. Think of this logically. Let’s say you buy a brand new beautiful “Brand X” acoustic console piano for $3500 and decided to sell it one year from now. You call the store you bought it from and find out they are now selling that piano for $3600 new. How close to the price of a new one do you think you can get for your one year old used one. 50%? 75%? 80%? 90%? Most likely you would be lucky to get 75% of the price of a new one. In fact 50% to 60% might be more realistic. Just reverse the situation. If you could buy a new one for $3600 or a used one for $2700; you’d probably go ahead and get new since you don’t have to worry about where it’s been and how it was cared for and if there might be something wrong with it, and the new one will include a full factory warranty, a tuning, and delivery. But at $1800 or $2000, you might gamble on the used one. OK. But wait, you say you’ve heard that acoustic pianos HOLD their value. Well, yes, they do, PROVIDED you keep it long enough for the price of the NEW one to have doubled. This usually takes about 20 years. So the piano you paid $3500 for in 2007, now in the year 2027 a comparable new one is going for $7000 so now you can get half of what a new one is going for which gets you your $3500 back. But WAIT! Did you factor in inflation? Did you factor interest? If you would have put your $3500 in mutual funds, stocks, or even a bank CD at 5% interest? You would have $9286. Oh and another thing, what about all the tuning and maintenance you performed over the 20 years to keep the piano up to snuff. If you did one tuning per year you would have spent $2978 in tunings alone. If you tuned it twice a year (the minimum that any piano manufacturer suggests) you would have spent $5966. Let’s not even discuss if the piano ever needed maintenance or regulation or any other repairs. And yet another point, what if you took all that money you spent tuning your piano and invested it once a year at 5% interest? You would have over $4500. If you base it on two tunings per year you would have over $10000. (“Over” because it is more difficult to figure because the cost of a piano tuning increases about 4% each year.) It’s not advisable to buy a piano (digital OR acoustic) for resale value. Buy it for the love and the joy of playing the piano…just like you buy your car, your camera, your computer, and most other goods. Now let’s examine a digital piano. Let’s say you buy one today for $3500. You decide to sell it 20 years from now. It is probably going to be worth about $500, and this is a very conservative figure. If you really want me to prove the point, let’s say it is worth nothing. (Why is $500 a conservative figure? Because we have had a couple of digital pianos we sold new around 1988 that cost about $1800, and we sold them for $500 to $800 within the last couple of years.) An average digital piano will need two repairs in 20 years. Let say a repair 8 years from now cost $150, and another repair 16 years from now costs $250. That is a total of $350. With the 5% interest investment factor, that is worth $573. Now take the money you would have spent tuning an acoustic piano and invest it in a CD at 5% you would have $4500; invest in mutual funds at 9% and you would have $7500. If you looking for “Investment”. Buy a digital piano. You will have an extra $3650 in your bank account ($7500 less the $3500 cost of the digital piano when new less the $350 you paid in repairs). |
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