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I stack it against something of similar value. If I spend $4,500 on three tickets for the World Series, how would it compare with a one-week vacation with my sons and wife, who may sacrifice their vacation for attending the game? Shout out to my wife here because she said, “Go live your life” but that was for the less expensive American League championship.

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One key to making a decision is whether it will drive you into debt. If you’re attending a major event and using instalment payment plans or boosting your line of credit, it’s clear you are offside.

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Mark Kalinowski, of the Credit Counselling Society, said he sees people in debt “all the time” because they financed something.

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“They live for experience,” he said. “People spend thousands for a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”

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They tend to view the cost as similar to payments on a car or mortgage, as a monthly payment rather than the total interest paid on the purchase.

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“If you put $5,000 on a credit card and just make the minimum payment, it sticks with you for 65 years,” Kalinowski said.

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Toronto could be back in the World Series twice in that time.

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You can’t draw a straight line from experiential purchases to bankruptcy, but they factor in, said Grant Bazian, president of insolvency firm MNP Ltd.

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“Reasons for financial difficulty vary all over the map,” he said, adding that those reasons have to be disclosed during a consumer proposal or a bankruptcy application. “Buy now and pay later is part of it. People want instant gratification. Whether it’s Taylor Swift or the Blue Jays, they can be tipping points.”

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The price is steep. A consumer proposal typically has a repayment period of five years, followed by three years on your credit report. A first-time bankruptcy can be discharged in two years, but it will affect your credit rating for five to seven years.

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These big-ticket items may not seem to make much sense until you start considering the value people put on them.

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Cindy Chan, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, said fear of missing out, or FOMO, drives some of the behaviour.

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“What we have found is social anxiety,” she said. “People have this anxiety of what the consequences are if I didn’t do this experience and I didn’t take part in it, and what will it do for my social standing?”

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Social media amplifies all this, but it also validates the value you get from an event because it lets you brag and share with friends.

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Chan said, unlike purchases, people don’t have that regret around experiences because they are singular and incomparable. You can miss that great game and do something else, even attend a Taylor Swift show, but it’s not the same thing.

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She said that even if I had witnessed a loss in Game 7 with my sons, it would have been a bonding event forever as long as the negativity from the event was mostly benign.

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I was also at game 7 of the American League championship in 1985 with my family and was crushed when they lost, but this week we all talked about that freezing October game in the dilapidated, old Exhibition Stadium.

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The average Canadian household spent about $5,000 per year on recreation in 2023, according to the latest Statistics Canada data.

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Spending it all on one memory is a stretch. If the experience is that valuable to you, it may be worth dipping into your savings. But it can’t be worth it to go into debt.

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