My 12-year-old has been anxiously awaiting the release of Animal Crossing City Folk for months now, and dutifully saving his allowance and his chore money. On Saturday he put down a $5 deposit at GameStop to ensure that he would get a copy, and today when we went to pick it up, he decided to trade in some old games that no longer get played. We had a coupon good for an additional 10% trade-in value and we also got another 10% extra trade-in value for belonging to their rewards program. He traded in 2 Wii games, 1 Nintendo DS game, and 5 GameCube games and ended up getting $3.92 credit on the rewards card, making his total out-of-pocket cost $1.08. Not bad!My boys love going to GameStop, both for buying and selling games. They will very often buy a used title, which can save 10 to 20% or more. And, depending on the game, they give very generous trade-ins. We got almost $20 for one of the Wii games--which offset the 35 cents we got for one of the GameCube games. Quite honestly, though, once the games stop being played, you might as well get what you can for them.
While I am not a big fan of video games in general, I AM a fan of teaching my boys to budget and save for what they want, and then find ways to make their out-of-pocket costs as minimal as possible.
