Originally Posted by Tom Steele

Well that's interesting. Do you have "replacement cost" insurance on your property or if your house burns down will you just accept "used re-imbursement" values?

The college was negligent in the maintenance of the dorm roof. Their negligence allowed my property to be damaged while I was paying them to live in the dorm. They were liable to replace my property.

But ultimately your lack of judgement is more simply proven by the math:

They got $20 from me (by not paying for the difference in the speaker price.)

I have chosen not to donate thousands of dollars over the past 15 years to their college.

Not a good long-term decision on their part. From my perspective, it has been a great financial move. I sleep soundly at night with no guilt or regret over not donating to my alma mater. And I've saved a bundle.

Also, as an FYI, I was a young kid who had saved up for quite a while to get that stereo system. All told, it was probably $500. A big investment to me, working for $3.35 an hour at a bakery and various odd jobs at the time while in school. I had also invested a lot of time picking out what I felt were the best speakers for the system within my budget (obviously a cheap budget) and I liked them.

They were no longer available when I went back. They had the same speaker model (and no longer on sale as I mentioned) but they were built with a different speaker paper and to my ears weren't as crisp as the ones I originally had.


I wasn't trying to scam the school. I couldn't replace the speakers with what I really wanted and was taking something lesser in my mind anyway. And I spent about 6 hours working at a bakery to earn the money so that I could replace my speakers that had been ruined by their negligence with lesser speakers .