koi purchases,gifts or lucky wins?

[dick benbow]

My Buddy Mark from the UK and I were discussing how we see others adding new koi to their collection. Atleast the stories that get passed around the households.

Some have koi that just get slipped in to the home unannounced. others are introduced as having "been won" from the club in a drawing.

Thought it might be a fun topic to discover how others perceive the situation and deal with it!

Ladies and gentlemen......start your stories! (LOL)

Around my house I'm always talking about asagi that I'm on the lookout for
but atlas everything seems to always fall through, so inadvertenly i think i have
created a situation like the little boy who cried wolf. Eventually no body believed him! ( so griff, we are gonna turn this thing around!)

[Mark Cooper]

So Dick, I'd thought I'd start the ball rolling with a couple of the tales I shared with you :

1. My Koi kichi pal Peter has a theory that in the UK more Koi have been “won” in club raffles than have ever been bought from Koi dealers!

2. A Koi keeping friend of mine used to only bring home new Koi at night, and waited until his wife had gone to bed and then released them into the pond. He got away with that for quite a while until one club member who had seen him buy a new Koi at a recent club visit to a local dealer enquired of his wife as to how the new Sanke was settling in …….”What new Sanke !?” came the repost from his wife. (Ooops !)

3. Another Koi Kichi I knew (who often dealt with cash in his business) used to regularly “salt away” a little cash in a shoe box that was hidden away in the house… he called it his “Koi fund”. He never told his wife about this shoe box nor the real cost of any Koi that he bought as he feared her wrath…it was amazing how many GCs he had in his pond that only cost £100 !. That was all fine, until one day whilst his wife was Spring cleaning, she discovered the shoe box with thousands of pounds in it !...boy, was he in trouble !

[swordfish]

Hi Dick,

Any new koi added will be announce to a few koikichi friends and invite them over for afternoon tea. Price of the koi is always kept a secret from my wife till today. I always told her it only cost $200/- or $300/- but will later 'show-off' to my invited friend that it actually cost 20X or more. She still doesn't know that the price I quote my koikichi friends are real. This way I feel a lot easier when I discuss with my friends without fearing that she'll eardrop on me.
I even have a secret credit card that I use to purchase my koi. It invisible to her of course.


SF

[B.Scott]

I tend to stray toward senario #3. While it isn't as extreme as Mark's buddy I do tend to "subsidize" the price of anything new I purchace. Lucky thing for me I don't do very many new fish
The afore mentioned Cash Business Dealings are managed by giving my spouse a "cut" of the profits. If I squirel mine away for koi then she has no right to groan, right?

B.Scott

[aquitori]

I just tell my dad I get my fish from hobbyist who quit the hobby . But, he knows the real story...and he doesn't bother askin anymore.

[soelistyo]

this is a funny thread.
amazed to know that this problem is more common that i'd imagined. i have a friend, a new hobbyists, who before his pond has been completed has already went on a shopping spree of nearly $20,000 on tosai koi. wife thinks it's 10% of that, and she's already complaining very hard about it. if only she knew...

not just that, he also made me an accomplice to a little white lie he told about a US$3,000 nisai kohaku he bought. the guy made me say it's a gift from me. his wife must think i'm such a good friend. the other day i decided to pull his leg, in front of his wife i told him i was having second thoughts about "gifting" him that fish, and if he didn't mind could i exchange it for another one from my pond (a male). when he said "no" (a bit too fast) i looked at his wife and complained to her how can someone actually point out which fish he is to be gifted, it should be up to the giver. she kinda agreed with me. i didn't push it but it was nice to see the fella squirm for a bit. haha.

i read a story in some magazine that a guy has an arrangement with his dealer that whenever he brings his wife along with him, the dealer is to quote the price at 10% of the actual number. all went well until one day during a shopping trip the wife started chatting to another customer who was at the premises when they were there. this guy was admiring the fish but didn't think he could afford them, until the man's wife disclosed that they really weren't that expensive and proceeded to give him their special price. needless to say the guy couldn't believe his ears, was ready to probably splurge on the whole lot, and i forgot how it ended but safe to presume a lot of explanation had to be made all round. haha.

personally, i'm lucky to have a wife who also loves koi, and already did even before we got married. the first time i went to her home was actually to look at her Dad's koi! anyway, it would've been pointless to lie about the prices of my koi as she does know the things don't come cheap. sometimes she even offers to buy a koi i like for me, when i feel it's a bit over budget. (yeah, i'm not making this up, seriously!). the one issue we have over koi is that she won't allow me to dig up the back garden for a bigger pond. well, i guess nobody's perfect...

[ChrisC]

Dick--don't tell me your Asagi fell through!

There are many people very eager to know what I pay for a given koi. I resort to evasion and subterfuge. "I got a great deal on her in a koi auction" and "you wouldn't BELIEVE what some people pay for their koi" --as if I were not one of them!!

[MJJoyce]

My husband and I have fish we buy as a team, and fish we buy separately, but we always know what each other's fish cost. As long as we each have the money in our own accounts and the bills are getting paid, we don't say much. We are pretty good at sticking to our "limits" as to what we'll pay. It helps having both people involved in the same hobby so you don't have to remember what story you told to what person. Our most expensive fish is, of all things, a large ginrin ochiba - I wouldn't have paid what he paid, but it was his money from an "attaboy" at work and she captured his imagination... what can you say?

[JasonS]

Interesting...

My wife had spent the most on a fish up until this spring when I bought one for $450.

The most valuable fish in my pond was a gift. Seriously. I hesistate to guess what the fish must have cost the previous owner but I am happy that it seems happy in its new home (not that it was unhappy in its previous home, I'm sure).

But I do like the following joke:
* I hope my wife doesn't find out how much these fish really cost before I die.
* But I fear she'll sell them for what I told her they cost.

[Dan Blatt]

Dick, as you know I actually won one in a judging contest on another board. A very nice Oomo female showa. Was 11 1/2 inches when I got her....now 18 inches and getting better all the time. Didn't have to lie about this one....not that I lie about any of them.