[drblast]

Anything that is an instrument of creativity. For me, this includes musical instruments, computers, and conventional building tools.

These things are priced all over the map. At the very low end, you get crap that ends up limiting your creativity. At the very high end, you're paying for a name or features that might be nice to have, but not having them isn't going to prevent you from going from amateur to pro if you want.

I buy the things in the middle of that spectrum. The sweet spot for musical instruments seems to be about $1000, although you can arguably get by with $500 instruments and be happy.

For computers, I buy the lowest priced one that has the features I want, usually wireless, decent graphics card, etc. Every computer produced since 2002 has had the power to do everything I need to do, minus high-definition video editing (nothing will ever be fast enough) and playing Starcraft 2. I have an $800 desktop for those two things, cheap laptops running Linux for everything else.

The best money I've spent recently was on singing lessons. Not a "thing," but finding the right instruction for something you want to do can be extremely valuable. For the rest of my life I'll be a better singer, which is great.