Good old SDXB loves to shop, but given that he’s a confirmed cheapskate his shopping habits are…well, interesting. He’ll go to the Base Exchange — cheap as you can get, right? K-Mart prices with no local tax. There he’ll amble contentedly up and down the aisles, gazing at all the Man Stuff (he loves tools….he loves camping gear…he loves fishing lures…he loves weapons…and because he cooks like a dream, he even loves pots and pans!). He picks up an item. He examines it. He studies it. He contemplates it. Then he puts it back on the shelf.
“If you want it,” you say, “why don’t you just go ahead and get it?”
“Maybe I will,” he says. “But whenever I find something on a shelf that I imagine I want, I pick it up, think about it, then put it back down. Then on the way out, I come back and look at it again. Sometimes by the time I get back, I’ve realized I don’t really need it.”
Saves a lot of money with that strategy. 🙂
Seriously, what it does is control impulse buys in a big way. It also prevents build-up of clutter around the house. Best of all, it forces you to think about each purchase and consider a) whether you really do need it and b) whether the specific object under consideration is the best choice.
Where big-ticket items are concerned, it’s a particularly useful technique. After you’ve examined the [car, boat, motorcycle, fridge, stove, dishwasher, spectacularly overpriced clothes washer] and heard the sales pitches and read the consumer reviews, wait! It’ll still be there in a few days. But your ardor to buy it may have cooled off enough to let you think about it more objectively.
By the middle of last week, M’hijito had made up his mind to buy the top-of-the-line Honda CRV. I really liked the vehicle, too, and had pretty well decided I would buy one — even started the process to extract funds from an old whole life policy to pay for it.
A day or so later, though, he announced that he’d changed his mind: decided to keep the junker and continue saving the equivalent of a car payment for another couple of years, so he could either pay for a new vehicle outright or have such a small loan it would take little effort to pay the thing off.
Understand: my son HATES the junker. It’s going to cost him $1700 to keep it running. That’s seventeen hundred dollars that will be dumped into a rustbucket that he loathes every time he has to get into it.
This is a man who makes SDXB look profligate.
I said, “Well, life is short, you know. It won’t hurt anything for you to get a better vehicle, and if it makes your life better, it may be worth it.”
He said he was going to look at Ford crossovers. 🙄
So the paperwork came from the insurance company — it’s going to take a week or two to disengage the cash from that outfit, and once I’ve closed out the cash value, presumably the $40,000 death benefit will go away, too.
Do I really want to get rid of an insurance policy that will pay my son 40 grand? Accountant says it’s irrelevant: he’ll inherit enough from me that he won’t need $40,000. But between you ’n’ me, I think 40 grand tax-free is not a bad little good-bye gift.
At any rate, the bureaucratic tergiversations delayed the purchase from the git-go, and then my son’s back-peddling gave me serious pause. My car is running well, should run for another 30,000 to 80,000 miles, and I don’t hate it. Hm.
Then a day or so later, my friend KJG and I get on the phone for a lengthy yakfest. One of the required topics of any conversation between old bats is the soap opera of our adult children’s lives. I brought up the automotive chapter and remarked that even though he had decided not to buy the CR-V, I still coveted one of the things. With leather seats. And lumbar support(!). And…gadgets whose purpose I have yet to understand!
She said that her daughter and son-in-law had bought a CR-V and soon traded it in. They felt it was too underpowered to meet their needs — which, since they live in a far-flung suburb, entail a lot of freeway driving.
Izzat so?
The CR-V comes with a four-banger and has no option to upgrade the engine. It’s a fairly large vehicle, and you can’t get a V-6 for it! It supposedly has a turbo-charged four, but…well. When you go back and read the Edmunds, Consumer Reports, and Car & Driver reports closely, you find every one of the reviewers remarks on the wimpy engine, every one of them complains that Honda offers no upgrade, and they all say that if a plush interior with many alluring amenities is more important than adequate power, this is the car for you.
Well. But I want both of those things.
I tend to be an assertive driver. Rarely do I rise to the level of “aggressive,” but I insist on being able to hold my own on freeways populated by homicidal maniacs. In Arizona, you need engine power for two purposes, neither of which is an option: To get yourself out of dangerous situations in high-speed traffic, and to haul your vehicle up steep grades.
The road to Yarnell is very steep, though it has a 25 mph speed limit (read “about 40 mph” if you want not to be pushed off the side by frustrated tailgaters). The freeway up the Mogollon Rim also has some pretty steep stretches, and if you can’t go at least 70 mph up the thing, you are a menace to navigation. If the point of getting a new car is so I can drive it out of town (wouldn’t think of taking the Dog Chariot up Yarnell Hill these days, nor do I relish getting stuck on the side of the I-17 halfway to Flagstaff), then I’ve gotta have a car that can make it up a steep grade with power to spare.
The Chariot does not have an especially plush interior, but it does have a 6-banger. When some bastard tries to pass me on the right on a one-lane freeway on-ramp, he gets a real surprise. The thing takes off like a rocket from a standing start and when it’s rolling, it can hold its own against anything that’s not a BMW or a Mercedes Benz.
It’s paid for.
If it runs for as many miles as Chuck the Wonder-Mechanic thinks, it will last another three to eight years.
Every year that I delay buying a new car makes it that much more likely that the next car will be the last car I’ll ever have to buy.
And if I want to scale the Mogollon Rim, renting a late-model car for a day trip would cost one helluva lot less than ponying up 25 or 30 grand to have the same vehicle take up residence in my garage.
Come to think of it, for 25 or 30 grand, I could buy a double-cab Dodge pickup, appointed like your living-room and den, with the engine of a Saturn rocket and the carrying capacity of two cross-over fake SUVs. Edmunds seems to like the Dodge better than any of its competitors.
Holeee sh!t. Lookit this beast! The damn thing has even got a file cabinet… Why on earth would anyone want a fake SUV when they could have the real McCoy, plus a place to hang the gun rack?
I’ve never been much of a truck lover, but man even I can appreciate the 2013 Ford F-150 SVT Raptor, drool… But the biggest problem with V8 trucks or even the V6 ones, the gas mileage SUCKS! God forbid you get a vehicle that also uses premium fuel. I said it in an earlier post but I think your son should look into the Mazda CX-5 Touring edition with the 2.5 liter engine. Great gas mileage and acceptable power 🙂 Plus looks great in red!
Actually, the 2013 Ram SLT 1500 gets better mileage (marginally) than the car I’m driving.
I love the adorable little Mazda Miata — but it would have to have the hard top, and that pushes the price out of my range. Plus I don’t feel very safe in a smaller car, not on Arizona roads. People are just too wacked-out around here! The larger Miata could be right, though.
At this point, I personally have arrived at the point of not knowing which way to jump. My vehicle is still running well and just this moment requires no fixes. So…when in doubt, don’t. I think I’ll just keep it until it does need some costly repair and then trade it in on a RAM 1500, which is a pretty darned amazing truck.
As for my son…he’s a grown man, and what he does is really none of my business. But personally, if it ’twere me, there’s no way in hell I’d put $1700 into a car that’s worth about $2000 or at best $2500, certainly not if I never did like the car. On the other hand, car payments are no fun, so I can understand how he’d prefer to hang on until he can collect another couple of years’ worth of purchase money.
Ahhhh…car payments. Haven’t had one of those in a while as I had an “epiphany” some time back when looking at trucks. First as I considered buying a new truck with all the bells and whistles and the guy was working up the financing and showed me a breakdown for 6 year and 8 year financing. The payments were reasonable however I was 48…which would mean I would be 54 OR 56 when the truck would be paid for and basically worthless. To me this made no sense and makes less now as the “dream truck” is over $50K. For the record my first house didn’t cost$50K….and had 2 apartments…Just my 2 cents…
Tied to payments for 8 years…isn’t that ungodly?
Some of the trucks out there are tricked out like a Rolls Royce! The RAM that I covet can be had for figures in the 50s, too. But the lower-end SLT is available right now in the high 20s — about the same as the Honda CR-V — and it has everything I could possibly want and then some.
I really like the American-style interior, which provides more amenities than the elegantly minimalist Japanese cars. For example, the front seats in the RAM 1500 have a big armrest/container with not one, not two, but THREE big cupholders — right in arm’s reach, not down on the floor. The back seats in the Quad Cab are large enough to accommodate adults, at least for short trips around town, which is not true of smaller trucks. There’s a secret compartment under the floor where you can stash stuff you’d rather not have seen from the outside or found by thieves when the car is ripped off. The back seats fold down, providing a ton of interior space that would hold Cassie and the proposed new pup, and where you can stash purchases when you run a chain of errands — as I always do. Some of these trucks (forget which brand & model) even come with two glove compartments.
That said…no matter which brand and style you covet, it’s just bloody outrageous that a car costs as much as a house should.
LOL! We paid $33K for our first house — and thought it was well on the high side of what we could afford.
I never understand the need for a fancy truck. I feel trucks are for working and while I can get behind a nice sound system and heated seats, I think anything else on a truck is not needed. If you want a large capacity vehicle that can off road and impress your clients, go for a nice SUV. You’d still get better gas mileage!
I really don’t want a full-sized SUV — they’re too ostentatious for my taste, sort of like a rolling McMansion.
The desired crossover vehicle, the Honda CR-V, is underpowered even for city driving. Heh…maybe especially for city driving, around here!
The truck I have in mind isn’t fancy: it’s a basic six-banger with two upgrades: cloth seats and Bluetooth. I think the 8-speed transmission is standard with the V-6, but if not, then I would add that as an upgrade. The gas mileage is better than what I’m getting in my Sienna. The CR-V and the RAV-4 get significantly better gas mileage — but at the expense of power that I happen to think is essential for safety, given my own driving habits and those of my fellow homicidal drivers.
A truck would have the same cargo carrying capacity as the Sienna — which I drive with all but one of the rear seats removed. And the RAM 1500 SLT with the Quad Cab would have plenty of room to shelter the dogs, to carry purchases inside a locked space, and even to carry as many as three passengers. To my mind, that makes it approximately equivalent to the Sienna, only with slightly better gas mileage.