I'm cheap, bird is fast, help me decide

While I continue to suck at alts, I am nevertheless slowly inching toward level 71 on my long-suffering druid out in Borean Tundra, which means I will have the opportunity to pick up swift flight form. The question, though, is will I do it?

It took me forever to finally get around to cobbling together the gold to get swift flight on Barls, and once I did, i swore I would be unable to live with slow flight again - but that was before they made slow flight over twice as fast as what Barls had been accustomed to. My druid cruises along at a clip which is far from plodding. With the original slow flight you felt like you were ambling, indeed, in a lot of cases I would use my swift land mount instead of my slow flier just to pick up the pace. However, the new 150% speed "slow" flight is really not horrible. It's no swift flight, but it might just be fast enough to live with.

And then there's the gold. Even with rep bonuses, short of going off on some time-sink rep grind, I need to come up with 4520 gold for the riding skill and the spell. That's a lot of gold. Sure, I've got it, twice, but I'm cheap, and that's a lot of gold. It has been hard enough to invest as much gold into this alt as I have and while I will never regret getting dual spec early, and I was more than happy to pay for heirloom cold weather flight (which makes Northrend questing wildly different the second time around), would I regret spending all of that gold on a luxury for an alt that I fall in and out of interest in?

Sure, I am not using that gold for anything, it's just sitting around on my bank alt, but it would take me several weeks of purposeful gathering and daily questing to replace it, time I could spend doing more enjoyable things.

I suppose I could take a different approach and make the alt pay for it herself, or if not all of it, at least a good part of it. Northrend questing and herb gathering is not without its profits, especially if you stay out of the auction house while you're doing it. Perhaps I will buy swift flight when the druid has earned and saved half of the price of the skill. I wouldn't miss 2300 gold on my bank alt as much as I would the full tally, and it would also have the effect of forcing me to justify the purchase through a demonstration of continued and ongoing investment of time in the alt - if I can get to the mid-70's and get that much gold together, odds are I've got the bug bad enough to finish the job.

That's far too reasonable, where is my usual rash and regrettable approach?