I'd like to know whether it's possible to somehow change the value after loading it. In my case I have a updated_at column in my MySQL database, which is timestamp type, but I want to format the date in different format.
We do the same in some apps, convert to a display format after read, and back to a timestamp on save.
I personally prefer not to alter data, but to deal with conversion on display, and after input processing. So the objects remain standard.
But don't forget a Model is a class any other, nobody is stopping you from adding a get_updatedat() method, that returns the timestamp in the format you want.