Garry Marr: I spent a fortune on a Blue Jays game and have no regrets

Here’s a confession and a brag. I went to game 7 of the American League Championship Series with my two sons, and watching the Toronto Blue Jays win was one of the greatest in-person sporting events of my life.

Did I get my money’s worth? That is a more difficult question to answer.

As secondary markets and micropayment options and social-media FOMO proliferate, fans may need to ask themselves a more fundamental question: How to put a price tag on life experiences.

I bought tickets strategically, but it is almost a matter of luck. As the World Series opens Friday, consumers face pricier secondary markets to attend the team’s first appearance since 1993. They will easily spend 20 times what a normal game costs, maybe 50 times.

The best strategy was to not buy your seats the moment the Jays won the last series; congratulations if you did, but you may have bought into the equivalent of the Toronto condo market peak.

“Interest tends to peak immediately after tickets go on sale (or a team clinches a spot in the World Series), and in the hours that follow, as well as the couple of days leading into the event itself,” a spokesperson for StubHub Holdings Inc. said in an email.

Fees charged in the secondary market are adding to ticket costs and can easily reach 30 per cent once buyers and sellers pay the charges.

Then there are online sites and less secure options, such as Facebook Marketplace. But you really need a safe payment method with recourse to get your money back if it is a fraud.

The people selling on the streets disappeared years ago and while many blame resellers for inflating prices, the teams essentially stopped leaving money on the table and are now maximizing what they can charge instead of letting brokers make all the money on a markup.

The price equation for tickets also affects concertgoers.

Online sellers moved in to fill the place of the street resellers. It’s a more secure process, but their charges inflate prices. The United States government estimates those charges account for 27 per cent of the average concert ticket price.

That’s the way the market is today, and the question for fans is whether to pay up.

Ted Rechtshaffen , a portfolio manager and chief executive of TriDelta Private Wealth, said it’s up to his clients on how to spend their money.

“What I say is that it all starts with being responsible, and responsible does not mean not spending it,” he said. “It means having the money so that you can spend it. If you are going to leave an estate with $1 million-plus, spend whatever you want on Jays tickets.”

It’s been 32 years since the Jays were last in the World Series, and Rechtshaffen said it is reasonable to wonder if you will be around for the next one.

He said establishing how you value the purchase is key.

“Do you love Taylor Swift or the Blue Jays and can afford it? If it is a memory that lasts forever, it becomes pretty easy to justify,” he said.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

“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.”

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.

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

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.

“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?”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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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