The object bought to celebrate success may require maintenance long after the excitement ends.

Rewards come with running costs. The thing bought to mark a good year arrives as pure pleasure and then quietly converts into a standing obligation: servicing, insurance, storage, the guilt of not using it enough. None of that was part of the feeling at the till. Years later you can end up maintaining a monument to a moment you have largely stopped thinking about.

Before the next celebratory purchase, price the decade rather than the day. And if you are already looking after something that has stopped giving anything back, letting it go is not a betrayal of the achievement.