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Automobiles

Back to Personal Finance: The 2018 Budget

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So it’s time for the annual Required Minimum Withdrawal (RMD) from the big IRA, which resides with Fidelity. Actually, I had to accelerate the drawdown by a few weeks, because I’m running out of money…waiting for the scheduled drawdown date in mid-September risked bouncing utility and car loan payments.

The car loan is the problem. Last fall when I bought the car, I put $4,000 down on it, which I could afford. What I couldn’t afford is the $400-a-month payments over the next five years.

Net 2018 annual income, based on the RMD and Social Security, will be $35,657. Net 2018 expenses, if they remain the same as they have been over the past 12 months, will be $36,899: a fine shortfall.

Payments are $194 twice a month: almost $400 a month, except…they’re set up to go out biweekly, meaning there are two extra payments a year, for a total of almost $5,044 a year.

I could probably cut the amount I spend by a couple hundred bucks a month: lay off Gerardo; buy cheaper dog food (or adopt out one of the dogs); eat more beans, rice, and pasta; grow some vegetables; stay out of Costco and cancel the Costco membership; cancel the Amazon Prime membership. That still wouldn’t make up the shortfall.

And…y’know…for reasons unknown, no substantial extraordinary costs have happened this year.

So even if I could cut $400 a month from the budget, it still wouldn’t cover surprise medical bills, dental bills, house repairs, car repairs, clothing, vet bills, and God only knows what else.

Somehow, then, I’ve got to get rid of that shortfall…and that somehow would be by getting rid of the auto loan.

One is not limited to the legally mandated RMD…one could (after all) draw down more than that.

Wonder-Accountant, however, pointed out that The Copyeditor’s Desk, an S-corporation, owes me money from a series of loans to it. If I drew a fair amount of it, I’d have to draw down that much left from investments. And the boss man at Stellar Financial pointed out that I could take the remaining cash out of an old Roth IRA. It would mean that much less would be earning tax-free…but the two strategies taken together would raise enough to get rid of the burdensome loan without incurring much tax liability.

Several expensive upkeep items are simmering on the burner…

• The house needs to be painted: got an estimate of $3,000, which is probably about right.
• A tooth hurts mysteriously. Whenever we figure out what’s causing the pain, that’s likely to rack up a stiff bill: $1,000+++
• The pool still needs to be replastered and the pump replaced: $4,000 to $6,000

Holy mackerel. Maybe I should draw down an extra three grand for the painter now, while shares are still worth something; then pay off the car, thereby leaving enough to pay for one other major expense this year.

If you have to sell stocks to unload a damn debt, this is the time to do it. The stock market isn’t going to stay up forever. Even under the best of circumstances, what goes up must come down. And we are decidedly not in the best of circumstances. Sooner or later, having elected a mentally unbalanced bully to the highest office in the land is going to come back to bite us all…

 

How Much Is Your Privacy Worth?

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Ironically, on the very day our bat-brained Congress negates recently established rules to (nominally) protect our privacy on the Internet, along comes this proposal from my insurance broker:

If I would like to cut this year’s $1,200+ tab for auto insurance, Safeco proposes that I should allow them to attach a “Right Track” device to my car. For 90 days, this thing tracks my driving habits: every time I start the car, every time I touch the gas pedal, every time I hit the brakes: how fast I go, when I go, and how long it takes me to get there.

It does not, he insists, distinguish whether I’m on a freeway or a surface street or a dirt road, nor does it (says he) know where I’m going. Apparently that’s true for Safeco’s device, but not necessarily for all such tracking devices used by the many U.S. insurors: some evidently do use GPS to track your every mile.

But here’s what: You start out with the promise that you could get a discount of as much as 30% on this year’s premium. That would put my premium back to what I was paying two years ago for a fifteen-year-old junker. Sounds grand, eh?

Not so much. You get dinged for every infraction of every driving characteristic they’re spying on. You get dinged for “hard acceleration.” One commenter at a forum I came across yesterday did the math and discovered that going from 0 to 7.5 mph in 10 seconds amounts to “hard acceleration.” You get dinged if you have to step on the brakes because a cat — or a kid — runs out in front of you. You get dinged if you drive your car between certain prohibited hours. It goes on and on. Every ding cuts your discount. At the end of the 90 days, you’re likely to end up with only the 5% offered if you would please just agree to our bald-faced intrusion into your private comings and goings.

More to the point, possibly, this kind of black-box data can be used against you. If you get in an accident — let’s say you do run down that granny and her three grandchildren in that darned crosswalk — the police or granny’s survivors’ lawyers can subpoena the data and use it to build a fine, expensive case against you. Maybe even put you in jail. In other words, effectively, you can be forced to testify against yourself.

As one of Get Rich Slowly’s readers commented a year ago,

1: If I brake hard to avoid a child running into the street, or avoid an inattentive driver pulling out in front of me, I get penalized for hard braking, while the inattentive driver – even WITH a monitor, if they pull out in front of me smoothly – will not be penalized for being a bad driver.

2: If I drive home responsibly during rush hour, because I have a job, I get penalized for driving at peak times, but the person driving home drunk after stopping at the bar for “a few” doesn’t get penalized.

3: If the device’s accelerometer settings are also calibrated to identify harder acceleration, I will get penalized for accelerating and merging properly on very short freeway entrance ramps, but the little old lady cruising down the freeway at 30mph with her left-turn signal on, will be rewarded.

On the other hand, 30% of something over $1200 is something over $360. Nothing to sneeze at, especially when you’re trying to live mostly on Social Security.

So I thought about this. Discussed it with my son, who happens to work in the insurance industry. Slept on it. And this morning sent a message to the Honored Insurance Broker:

In the first place, my driving record should speak for itself. I’ve been on the road for over 50 years, and in all those years I’ve had two minor fender-benders — not counting inflicting a scratch the side of my co-religionist’s car in the church parking lot. One of those fender-benders was arguably not my fault, since the other driver ran a red light.

In the second place, it’s an unconscionable invasion of privacy. I realize Big Brother is watching us everyplace we go, and I realize that a 2014 Toyota is already equipped with gear that tracks every breath I take. But that doesn’t make it right, it doesn’t make me like it, and it certainly doesn’t incline me to go along willingly with it. There’s something especially distasteful about being asked to compromise my principles for a few bucks.

And in the third place, when you look into this, you find it’s likely to be exactly that: very few bucks. Companies promise a discount of from 5% to 30%, but the amount depends on how they adjudge your driving skills. Drivers report being dinged for accelerating from zero to 7.5 mph in 10 seconds: that’s hardly a drag-race speed. They also say you’re dinged if you stop normally at a stoplight, rather than taking your foot off the gas when you see a red signal way off in the distance. They report being flicked off by other drivers for blocking traffic with blue-haired driving techniques.

In the Phoenix area, blue-hair driving is unsafe: when you hold up traffic by not getting off the dime or by hypermiling toward stop signs and signals, you can cause accidents by enraging other drivers, and you put yourself at risk of a great deal worse than an occasional finger flicked in your direction. Aggressive brake-checking, harassment, and even shots fired are likely consequences.

I’m not going to put myself at risk nor am I going to subject myself to even more invasion of privacy for a few bucks.

And you? How do you feel about this matter? Will you sell your privacy for a few bucks? Yes? And how much does your soul go for?

Images: Depositphotos, © ciuciumama

There Must Be Something I Like about This Car…

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What is it?

Yesh. I find myself grousing off and on — not to say incessantly — about the “new” car, a 2014 Toyota Venza, which in my petrified opinion seems to compare poorly to the much-lamented, ancient, 17-year-old Sienna. Why do I hate this hapless car?

  • It won’t safely hold the dogs except in a cubby with no air-conditioning, because when you fold the back seats down they leave a big dog-leg-busting hole in the (admittedly generous) flat space.
  • It suffers from the current bourgeois car design, in which about 90% of cars on the road look the same: like a herd of bloated ticks.
  • Its stupidly designed rear door operates on two “struts” whose life expectancy is about two years and the cost of whose repair is, shall we say, bracing.
  • There is NO place, zero, none, nada, NO place to set a small, loose item that does not entail either a) having to dig around in an inaccessible bin or b) watching it tumble off the top of the annoying console and wedge itself between the driver’s seat and the stupid console, causing a major, major hassle to retrieve it.
  • Its stupidly designed console apparently holds only paper cups — real cups and plastic traveling glasses need not apply.
  • Its stupidly designed console makes it impossible to set anything — like your purse or a bag of purchases — on the passenger-side floor, because you cannot reach the damn floor over the monster useless console.
  • It has a stupid camera on the front of the rear-view mirror that militates against hanging your crip-space placard from the mirror, where you are required by law to hang it if you have the temerity to park in a crip space.
  • Its dashboard is a rattle magnet.
  • There’s  no place to hang, stick, or set a trash bag.
  • The burglar alarm arms if you manually lock the doors while sitting inside, and then it goes off if you turn on the ignition. Extremely, extremely, mind-bogglingly annoying.
  • Speaking of stupid, its designers apparently think the vehicle’s prospective drivers are so dumb — SO DUMB — that they can’t figure out what direction they’re driving without a little light on the rear-view mirror to tell them. What??? All Trump voters, presumably?
  • It has no cladding to protect it from fellow idiot drivers who like to whack their neighbors’ cars in parking lots and run shopping carts up against the white paint.

Arrrghhh!

So…is there anything about this car that’s good? Desirable? Not annoying?

  • I like that the doors lock automatically when you turn on the ignition. It’s not necessary, because I hit “lock” reflexively the instant I get in a car. But it’s nice.
  • You can set the headlights to go on every time you turn the ignition key — which the Sienna did automatically, no choice in the matter — and to stay on about two minutes after you get out of the car. No, the Sienna would not do that. It’s very nice when you park in the garage after dark. My garage does have a motion-sensitive light, but sometimes the car doesn’t trigger it. With the head- and tail-lights on, you can close the garage door, get out, and walk around even if the motion-sensitive lighting hasn’t gone on.
  • It has ultra-dark window tinting. No one can see how many people are in the car or, from the side  and back, whether the driver is a woman alone. And you can’t see any packages sitting on the floor. Now…that tinting is probably illegal. But so far I haven’t gotten a ticket.
  • It does have a six-banger. And it bangs with even more enthusiasm than the Sienna’s awe-inspiring engine. If anything, I’d say it’s over-powered. The body apparently doesn’t weigh as much as a minivan’s, and so you get some instability in the steering if you take off too exuberantly from a standing stop.
  • It’s kewl that you can connect your cell phone — even a piddly little clamshell — to the sound system and hear a conversation in full glowing stereo. This is good, because it’s almost impossible to hear someone speaking to you on the clamshell; run its sound through the radio, and voilà! Intelligible words!
  • The wheels are easy to clean thanks to their sort of skeletonized design.
  • Its air conditioning probably works pretty well. We shall see: we have yet to enjoy a 115-degree day. But the heater gets warm quickly and keeps the driver’s compartment comfortable enough.
  • If you park it in the sun, the cheesy plastic in the dashboard will expand in the heat and silence the rattling. It would be good if it didn’t rattle at all…but you can’t have everything, eh?
  • The radio works. The CD player still works.

 All of which is nice. I guess.

Gestalt II: The Update

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Okay, the dust has settled from this morning’s freneticism.

Nothing has been decided about the bathtub drain, although I did determine, by poking around with an orange stick, that the exit hole in that drain is amazingly small. It may be that the drain is slow because it’s just built that way. This is something I will think on.

The dogs have settled down, apparently having yapped themselves into a stupor. As Catseye pointed out at this morning’s post, there’s nothing like a barking dog to spike your blood pressure. Indeed, that was the reason Cassie’s previous humans cited for dumping her at the dog pound. Ruby, however, is not a barker; she usually will not rise to the barking bait even when Cassie is baying. There actually has to be something going on to cause Ruby to bark.

The going-on, as noted, was the joy of young children playing on the street, it being a school holiday. Arf!

The kids have now gone even further on to bigger and better things, probably televised, and so the hounds are napping.

Out at the pool, which has been shut off for the past several days pending arrival of a repairman, the following Discoveries were discovered:

• The pressure gauge is not, after all, busted. With a little fiddling, I fixed it.

• Harvey the Hayward Pool cleaner stopped dead in the water NOT because the pressure gauge was broken or because much of anything else was wrong with the pump and filter, but because he had ingested a pecan, kindly dropped into the pool by a passing bird.

Those birds do that all the time. My challenge is to train the critters to deposit the pecans, preferably un-nibbled, right outside the back door, thankyouverymuch.

So with great pleasure I called off the pool repairman.

Planning to dump a bag and a half of pool shock into the drink, I tested the pool water first. Good thing: Acid level was normal; chlorine level was so high it turned the yellow test color to orange. Ooohkay…that explains why no algae has been growing in those much-neglected precincts. It also excused me from having to shock the pool, lhudly sing huzzah.

It further excused me from the planned trudge to Home Depot. Main thing I needed to buy there was chlorine tabs, at an elevated (not to say “extortionate”) price. Clearly, with chlorine levels high in the toxic range, there’s no need to add more…

The effing Venza (the more I drive that car, the less I like it) has again developed an infuriating rattle, somewhere in the vicinity of the dashboard. This, it develops, is a known issue with the Venza…and with several other other late-model Toyotas.

When I say I will never buy another Toyota as long as I live, I am not kidding. If I could figure out how to trade this thing in on something else without bankrupting myself, I would do it. Today.

The last time (which is to say the first time) I noticed this, I made an appointment with Chuck the WonderMechanic, who thought he could fix it. But before I could get the car to him, the rattling stopped. And…interestingly…here’s how it happened to stop:

I’d driven out to lovely Sun City at SDXB’s dinner invitation. When I got into the car to drive home after dark, it suddenly started rattling — and I mean make you CRAZY rattling.

The weather was much like it is right now: crisp and rainy.

A couple of days later — before the appointment at Chuck’s — I rattled on down to a Costco. Left the car parked in the lot for half an hour or 45 minutes. Then moved on to a Target, where the vehicle sat in that store’s lot for another 45 minutes, give or take.

In the Target lot, it was parked facing the sun. As today, the sky was patchy: sun and clouds. That meant the sun had at least some opportunity to shine directly on the black plastic dashboard.

Ohhhkayyy…now I come out of the Target, climb into the car, drive away…and realize it’s stopped rattling!

Huh. I surmise that the sun has heated the black plastic enough to cause it to expand, and in doing so has tightened the joints between the several plastic parts that comprise the contraption’s dashboard.

I do not take it to Chuck.

This was several weeks ago.

It was fine until yesterday. But weirdly, the weather conditions are almost identical: it’s been raining, it’s been cold.

So, when I rattled on home, I parked it on the driveway facing into the sun, and left it there for an hour. Figured if it worked before, maybe it’ll work again.

Well. It might have sort of worked: after letting it sit for an hour, I took it out again. The rattle seemed less egregious. But…it still rattles.

Okay…if a little solar heat is good, a lot must be better, eh? Left it parked in the driveway again. Whenever I feel like getting up, I’ll drive it around the block again.

It looks like little can be done about this. When you get on the Web, you see a lot of crazy schemes indulged by do-it-yourself aficionados. Some worked, some didn’t. But none of them are things I care to bother with.

This would explain why the vehicle was turned in after two years, wouldn’t it?

Friend came by with her books in hand. We’re going to donate them to the church’s fund-raising book sale, with stickers on the inside front cover directing readers to where they can find more of Friend’s work.

These are children’s books, and they’re really pretty cool. She is a grade-school teacher and a special-ed expert. The books are precisely targeted to specific grades. As part of her marketing campaign, she has gotten herself invited to classrooms to work with the books and the kids…and as she was describing the things she and the teachers were doing with them, I realized she had a kind of de-facto lower-grade textbook-like tool. I suggested she write teachers’ guides describing the various insightful and innovative ways she had for working with them. She liked the idea.

Another fucking robocaller jangled as I sat down to eat lunch, drink, and write this.

Checked into Ooma again. It still looks dauntingly technophobia-inducing. To hang onto your phone number (which I really need to do, since it IS my business number), you have to ask Ooma to switch it over. It takes three to four weeks, they say, to make the shift — though you get to use your number, you apparently also get to pay Cox for the privilege (as well as paying Ooma) and during that time, obviously, you wouldn’t be able to engage NoMoRobo.

It doesn’t exactly defeat the purpose…but it sure as hell makes it more difficult to achieve the purpose.

So I remain undecided about whether I want to subject myself to the hassle of changing carriers.

Most of our paying work is under control just now. Returned one article to the client this morning. The Kid is working on a second. So from my perspective, nothing remains to be done. We’ve read over 300 pages of the 475 pages the project is said to comprise, and now we have a lull. I should be able to goof off.

Which, you could say, is what I’m doing now.

 

 

 

 

Emptying Out the Nest

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nest thermostatSometimes I feel like I’m swimming backwards: searching for retrograde items to replace commonplace tools that were once so functional  you barely noticed they were there but that have been replaced with computerized junk so complicated you can’t even begin to figure out how to make it work — or even if it does work. Current case in point: the Nest.

My son kindly bought me one of these formerly extremely kewl thermostats as a birthday present. And at the time it was awesomely kewl, the product of a band of ambitious young Turks. You could tell it what time you wanted to jack up or down the house’s temperature; or you could tell it to watch for you and to turn off when you’re not around. So, say, you could set it for 80 degrees on a 110-degree day, and it would keep the temperature around there while you were in the house, but if you went out for a few hours, it would shut itself off until you came back, saving you large amounts of money.

Then Google bought Nest.

Yeah.

thermostat honeywellWell, even if you didn’t mind the presumption that here’s another way for Google to spy on you, the problem is that Google decided to break the Nest. A year or so ago Google force-fed programming into the thing (you have no choice in the matter: the software downloads automatically and unbidden), and that program is just simply incomprehensible. You can NOT figure out how to make it work.

Lately I’ve been waking up every morning at 2:00 a.m. sharp, in a fit of discomfort: thinking I’m having hot flashes!

Hot flashes? At 71? Really?

Through the wee-hours stupor, I realize the heater’s running. In a daze, I climb out of bed, stumble down the hall, and turn the damn thermostat back off. And I wonder: is this a senile error? Did I not turn it off last night? I’m SURE I turned it off. The house was colder than a bigawd when the dogs and I huddled together in the bed at 10 p.m. How can it be back on?

Well, of course, “back on” unbidden is the Nest’s nature. And there seems to be no way to tell it off, OFF, goddammit STAY OFF! The Nest will turn itself back on when it deems proper: at about 65 degrees. Thank you very much for arrogating my decisions unto Thyself, dear Google.

Peeved after I see this month’s power bill — about $30 more than it should be, even though it’s effin’ freezing in here when I’m not having the 2 a.m. “hot flash” — I google “nonprogrammable thermostat.”

What should come up but a simulacrum of the good old Honeywell round thermostat!

Unfortunately it’s not the real good old thermostat, because it’s not a mercury thermostat. That was the reason they took real thermostats — the ones that used to…you know, function? — off the market. We might hurt ourselves with that mercury. And God knows we’re all too stupid to figure out how to recycle it properly.

User reviews are middling. At Home Depot, the Honeywell racks up a 4 out 5 possible stars, with 14% hating it. At Amazon, though, a full 20% bash it with one-star reviews.  Since on average you can expect to see 9% negative, this comes under the heading of bad reviews. By and large the main complaint (except for the guy who got an empty box in the mail) is inaccuracy, but as I recall the old real Honeywell mercury thermostat left something to be desired in that department…it’s pretty easy to adapt to, though. Only 59% of Amazon reviewers love it up with 5 stars; most of those folk seem to be the nostalgic type, pining for gear that has escaped digitization.

On the other hand…i prob’ly fall into that category… 😀

So, what we have here, so far, are four tools so laden with electronic frou-frou that they barely operate:

• A shiny double oven, about $2,500 worth, whose highest and best use is to store pots and pans.

• A thermostat that thinks it knows your mind better than you do, and will not brook any argument.

• A car whose steering wheel is so packed with buttons to operate doo-dads that you have to take your hands off the wheel to honk the horn. Makes sense, eh? No one would ever think of honking a horn when some emergency was under way… A car bearing 28 computers, which working in concert will track your every move, operate your telephone, tell you which way to turn (not always correctly), and god only knows what else. But it’ll cost you $1,000 to fix a door that quits operating.

• A clothes washer that will not wash, but that will explode. 😀

Hilariously, a few days ago Samsung sent me an urgent message with instructions about what can and cannot be washed in the washer — your comforter, for example, topmost among the NOTs… And with a new dial stick-on emphasizing that you cannot wash sheets in any cycle other than the “bedding” cycle. Which is just as well, one figures, since that’s the only cycle that releases enough water to launder so much as a pair of nylon panties…

Well, now we have a very fine wash machine, a throwback to the 1970s, whose agitator actually sloshes the laundry around in a whole tubful of water.

The dishwasher, a Bosch, has started to make ominous growling noises. I suppose that will be the next to go, soon to be replaced by yet another over-engineered device that doesn’t work. Kitchen appliances, including the Bosch models, are now engineered to crap out in 7 years. The other day SDXB reflected that he’s been in Sun City for 13 years now. He moved out there shortly after I moved into this house, in the wake of a dispute with a nefarious neighbor. So…that dishwasher is well into its dotage.

Just like its human…which also growls a lot.

Do You Really NEED a Car?

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lightrail-Phoenix_Exterior_7417.2008If you live in the big city that is: how much, really, do you need a car? And if you didn’t need one…how much would not having a car not cost you?

Yesterday I realized there’s no way I can make ends meet with a $385 car payment, not on Social Security and an RMD…even with the market thundering along like a high-speed freight train.

Sure, I could take more out of the stock market to make up the shortfall, over each of the next five years. But that will take a bite out of my long-term retirement savings…and the bite is likely to be a great deal bigger as time passes, since in my opinion we will be seeing a pretty drastic recession in the not too distant future. The Trump recession is likely to make the Bush recession look like small potatoes.

Just IMHO…

At any rate, I do not want to let a car — and not a particularly good one — suck away my retirement.

Applied for a job a friend told me about, one that needs to be filled within two weeks. Department chair said I’m not qualified.

Hee heeee! Nothing like a Ph.D. issued in 1979 and 72 years under your belt to do that for you, is there? 😀

So I’m walking the dog and a thought crosses my mind…

Y’know, when I took the junk in to have its struts replaced, the Toyota service dept. rented me a car for $50. Had the thing for two days, drove it around; topped up the gas tank for $6.25 and turned it back in, no hassle.

I don’t do what you’d call a helluva lot of driving. And in theory I could do a whole helluva lot less: the new lightrail goes right past the end of the street, and an Albertson’s, a Safeway, and a Walgreen’s occupy corners about half a mile away. Even the Walmart is only about a mile and a half from here.

Could one, as a big-city girl and resident of a burg with designs on urban sophistication, could one do without a car? And if one could, then what?

This car is costing me almost $400 a month, and that doesn’t include the gasoline (it gets a munificent 20 mpg) or Arizona’s astonishing registration fees on newer vehicles. Or the insurance, to the tune of $700+ a year.

Registration in Arizona is $2.89 for every $100 the state thinks your car is worth. Since I’m paying $22,0000 for it, I expect they’ll charge me for about 20 grand worth: that will be $576 thankyouverymuch, along about the end of next summer when the utility bills are sky high.

So let’s see: $576 registration + $700 + ($385 x 12) = $5898. That’s $492 a month. Not counting gasoline, maintenance, and repairs.

Uhm… Y’know, you could rent a car for a reasonable number of days at $50/day. Almost 10 days as a matter of fact: 9.84 days.

I don’t think I actually drive 9 days a month. It’s probably more like 6 or 8 days a month.

And how many Uber rides could you rent for that? Uber costs 9 cents a mile here, plus a 40-cent booking fee. According to their website, it’s $8 to $10 to the Safeway: $20 plus tip round-trip. Plenty more than that to get to the doctor…but how often does one go to the doc? The train, which will drop you off in front of the AJ’s, goes right by the dentist, and stops across the street from the Target and Costco: $5 a day.

But it wouldn’t take that many Uber rides to get where you wanted to go.

Usually I run my routine boring errands on the way home from the weekly business networking group meetings. A Sprouts, two Trader Joe’s, three Walgreen’s, a Whole Foods, and a Safeway are right on that beaten path. A Costco and the AJ’s are in the general vicinity. So in theory, I could rent a car the night before, schlep to Scottsdale, and then do all my errands on the way home. Return the car: repeat seven days later.

Incidentals could, in theory, be bought at the neighborhood Albertson’s and Sprouts. It’s not very safe to walk down there, Conduit of Blight Boulevard being the garden spot that it is. But as long as you didn’t carry a purse — I’d pin a credit card inside my jeans pocket so it couldn’t fall out or be pickpocketed — it wouldn’t be too bad. It’s only about a half-mile, part of the way through the residential area.

How would I get to church?

In theory I could ride a bike down there on Sunday mornings. On Wednesday nights, of course, that would be unsafe: you’d have to traverse main drags in the dark, where it would be really hard for car drivers to see you.

For choir rehearsals, I pick up a friend who doesn’t like to drive at night. He lives just about a mile away — an easy enough walk. I could walk over there and we could drive down and back in his car. As long as I had a can of mace, it would be reasonably safe to walk back and forth between their house and mine.

So then all you’d have to cope with would be light emergencies: sick dog, quick trip to the doctor, the trip to FedEx for the last-minute photocopy job, whatEVER. For that: Uber.

Four short car rentals a month would cost me $200. That’s less than half what I’m paying for the pile of metal and plastic adorned with 28 computers sitting in the garage. Not counting the gasoline. At 20 bucks a hit, that would leave enough for 10 Uber rides or 50 days’ worth of train rides.

Soooo…there we have a question.

Why do I have this car at all?