Really fine luxury watches are, affordable, relatively speaking.
It will cost about 15 thousand to plant you six feet under, or more, and add maybe five grand more for your tombstone. Twenty grand won’t even buy a middle sized car today.
And truly fine watches hold resale value.
Provided some scuzzy seller doesn’t sell you a fake for two thousand instead of three thousand for a fake Black Bay Tudor.
My mother gave me a Tudor Monarch in 1993 and it still looks new, like this one.
Why it looks new, is I wear replicas, like this $175 Orient Ray II.
The Orient is a higher end homage or replica or whatever you may call it, except it‘s not a fake. It’s an OrienT watch with an in house Orient movement.
I also own a 1962 Omega pie pan Constellation, and my father’s 1958 Hamilton Thin O Matic, both with domed acrylic crystals.
Here’s why I don’t wear those daily.
Longines Ultra Chron with popped off crystal and missing second and minute hands. Ooooops!
Instead I own two Orient Bambinos and a gorgeous OrienT Star Classic Gen 2 with blue dagger hands. If carefully worn an Orient holds quite a bit of resale value.
Here’s why the Seiko NH35 powered “mod watches” absolutely rule the drawers of the watch addicted souls like me:
Like my pipes, I don’t know how many watches I own.
I guess that $30 homage Seiko that quit running in a couple of years in 1968 just ruined me.
If I’d picked out a real Seiko when I was ten years old it either would still work or for $40 I could sit down and replace, myself, the movement
with a brand new, better version. No other watch ever made goes longer between service than a Seiko automatic, some over fifty years.
In the mail on a slow plane from China is this square case watch with a Seiko NH35 and blue leather strap, total cost $67 with taxes.
It sorta kinda resembles an up to a million dollar Royal Oak. Not exactly.
At 40mm that will be a chunky, blingy watch on my wrist.
All my four other watches with a Seiko automatic run extremely close, within a few seconds a day.
And one of them is almost thirty years old and hasn’t ever been serviced. I paid less than fifty bucks for it, then.
It’s not for sale, but it’s worth more than a new one.
