Rewind to just over a year ago and I place a (pre)order for 5 ASIC miners (from Butterfly labs) for a total of $3250. When the things arrived, a year later, I was lucky that they were still profitable at the time (mid August) as the price of BTC had risen but decided to sell them on eBay for ~$3000 each because not only were they ridiculously loud and I had no where to put them but the difficulty was ~60 million and increasing (and it's now 148).
I was lucky enough to pay off my credit card and still have some left over with the money I made from selling the miners. Although I made a decent profit, I would have made a lot more if I'd of just bought the coins for the same value (as they've increased ten fold in the same period).
Now I've invested around half of my profits back into buying coins and so have finally taken the original advice onboard. This and the current market conditions make even the best mining options from Cointerra seem like a risky investment at this stage.