Depreciating Assets

There is a drawer in most Lagos homes holding half a million Naira in dead equity. The old iPhone in it is not being kept. It is being held while it loses value every month it stays there.

The mechanism is loss aversion doing what it usually does. Selling the device feels like giving something up, so the decision registers as a loss and gets postponed. Keeping it feels like safety and registers as nothing at all, which is exactly why the cost stays invisible.

The word doing the damage is "backup". Calling it that converts a financial decision into an object, and objects do not demand decisions. Almost nobody with a backup phone has used it, and almost everybody with one believes they might.

Ore's framing is to price the inaction. A depreciating asset held for a contingency that has not occurred in two years is not insurance, it is a position nobody chose to take and nobody is monitoring.

The implication is not that everyone should sell immediately. It is that the drawer contains a real number, the number is falling, and treating it as zero is the one option guaranteed to be wrong.