You’re always financing material things with your time, whether you pay now or later. The better question is: how much of your life do you want to trade working for “x”? Let’s say you have a ‘good’ job and make $50 per hour (that’s about a 100k per year income). After taxes and living expenses you actually make about $20 per hour (and that’s being generous). So a $10,000 mountain bike will cost you about 500 hours or 63 full working days of your life. Alternatively you could by a very high quality used mountain bike for $2,000 which only costs 100 hours or 12.5 full working days (which is still absurdly expensive for a bicycle). You now have 50 days of free time to ride this used bike relative to some fool who spent $10,000 on his cool bike that sits in his garage while he’s at work.