As mentioned in my previous post, I planned on buying a new high-end cell phone as well as a upgrade a broken plasma TV on the same day. Worst case scenario, I saw this costing me $1000. That’s a tough hit that you don’t see too many personal finance bloggers make in one day.

The first thing was the plasma TV return to Costco. Costco has a great liberal return policy. It’s almost so good that it’s a fault. Allow me to explain. Because plasma TVs had dropped since when I bought mine, I was able to get a name brand with a lot of extra features for just over $500. At the time, the same TV might have cost me $1500 more. The returns woman seemed to look at me as if I was trying to scam her, “We really need to change this return policy”. Alas she admitted there was nothing they could do and they don’t have a plan to sell an extended warrant (recommended by many on plasma TVs). So now I have new TV. The only problem was transporting it home and setting it up. You think that because it’s thin it would be light. It is not.

Later, I called Sprint to order the Palm Treo 700P. Because it was on their web site, but their telesales couldn’t find it in their system, they decided to give me $250 off for signing a new two-year agreement. I usually try to stick to one-year agreements, but this was a pretty good deal. I’m now free to buy the device from Sprint’s or Palm’s website at my leisure. It turns out that Palm is giving away a free 1GB Secure Digital card for those who have previous Treo’s and programmers (like myself) who have registered with them (which is free) get an additional $100 off a new Treo. That takes a $650 phone and makes it effectively $350 or $325 if you count the value of the SD card. It looks like my current Treo 650 would fetch about $225 to $250 on Ebay, so I’m really looking at an outlay of $75-$100 for the upgrade.

The final cost on the day should be about $600 — not bad considering what I thought it was going to cost me going in.

According to many message board it seems the Palm Treo 700 is going to be available from Sprint tomorrow. Since I’m out of contract, I hope to get it for the $399 price that’s for new subscribers. I expect that it won’t quite be easy and I’ll have to argue or threaten to go to Verizon.

If that isn’t enough, I’m taking a trip to Costco. The plasma TV that I bought not too long ago isn’t working like it did in the beginning. Whenever it goes from a light scene to a dark one, the light scene is burned in for a good 3 minutes or more. The reason I bought from Costco is that instead of having an extended warranty they have a lenient return policy. So I’m going to return the defective no-name TV and switch to a Phillips or Pioneer. It’s probably going to cost me $500 dollars for the upgrade to a name brand.

I realize this is an unusual post for a personal finance blog. However, I do skimp and save quite a bit for a couple of these luxury items.