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Domaining is a huge industry in itself, but yes, there are some good ones out there.  dnforum.com and namepros.com have been two sites that interest me a lot. General guidelines- .com's are by far worth the most based on supply/demand, especially anything with a single dictionary word or 2-4 letters (less always better, no numbers always better).  Other TLD's can be worth something, but seem to see much less consensus on their value.  Even the above- it does vary.  Sometimes you see a fish.com sell for $1 mil.  I've seen other dictionary words go for south of $5k (although that's been a little while). At the end of the day, I would only consider what it's worth to you though.  I personally don't think that .com's will ever go anywhere, but the Internet is fast-paced, and there are no guarantees.  There are some pros out there that are buying some pretty fancy boats off of buying and selling, but they do it in large volumes, and play the numbers.  Personally, I ran a hosting company for 7 years, and had to resist a whole lot of temptation to buy up domains based on the enormous wealth of data of data on other webmasters kept in good faith that I had at my fingertips. After leaving to start my own inbound marketing agency, I bought the domain of my last name (northcutt.com) for more than you've suggested, but there were real reasons (most of all, that I was left with little else than my personal brand to side-step into a totally different industry, and I had the chance to do it).   But that price was built into my startup budget.  Whatever you go with, I'd just make sure it's something you're happy with typing thousands of times, and explaining to people how to access.  A lot.  Anything short and memorable can also work well, and I wouldn't worry too much about weird TLD's for SEO anymore.  Personally, I'm a big fan of .io domains as well.  

Unless your old site is penalized for some reason, I don't see any reason you should go for a new domain within the same traffic segment. With 5 years of domain age, chances are that your efforts will take less time on the old domain to bring results. With a new domain, things won't be as simple as they look. I would have taken age of the site as a big advantage and stuck to old domain. Overall costs would be lower for the results to be achieved in case of old domain. Now, if for some reason the old domain or site was penalized, then that is a different matter altogether. Thanks, Rajesh Dhawan

Hi Kevin, Actually, you can see all of the categories if you click on them. Lots of changes, huh? Miriam

Thanks for the comments and insight....good for for for thought. I do not need to just duplicate what is out there and expect to succeed.

Andrew, that's a great post by Nyagoslav. I missed that one. He has become my favorite new Local SEO over the past year. What a smart fellow!