Buying refurbished tech - best consumer tips

Useful tips when buying refurbished tech items - how to spend wisely?

Buying refurbished goods is something that I strongly encourage people to do. There are couple of quire strong reasons why used tech makes sense these days:

$ savings vs buying new

As you know, refurbished tech is much cheaper than their new alternatives. The downside here is that when buying used tech items it is usually an older model that is no longer in production and that may cause you some problems servicing them. Other than that I think it is worth saving some money on purchasing refurbished, especially when it is not essential for you to have the very latest technology. For example, that is how a saved $ big time when I bought my Dell Latitude E7240 couple of years ago - bought it almost 1/2 off the buy new retail price.

Refurbished vs Recycled

I personally think that it makes more sense to use an already manufactured tech item as long as possible instead of recycling it after just few years of use. Sometimes it is just a small part that fails and could be easily replaced so that it becomes usable again. With over 7 billion people on this planet we should think more about consuming less in all aspects of our living, otherwise we risk running out of valuable resources and polluting the Earth to such extend that it would be impossible to reverse some destructive processes and habits.

Refurbished high-end electronics

One of the biggest advantages of buying refurbished goods though is the fact that one can afford buying an item from much higher class/price range as an alternative to a cheaper brand new electronics.

Example: What would you prefer, a brand new VW Golf or factory/dealer certified BMW 3-series?

Whrere to buy refurbished electronics?

The biggest auctions sites like eBay and Amazon have plenty of good used/refurbished tech, so I would strongly recommend you to check those. For Eastern European customers I would advise you to check some listings at OLX or any of the alternatives. If you can't find the item you are looking for just try with generic Google search, that may help as well.

For any questions or comments about refurbished tech and electronics, please feel free to drop me a line in the comments section below.

Thanks!