You make enough money to buy a new car. The payment is, what, three, four hundred a month? That’s not bad, you can afford that.
Whoa nelly! If you are thinking I’m leading you to buy a new car or keep the car you have with it’s payments, you are reading the completely wrong blog. You can afford it…but why try? Here you are, turning your ketchup bottles upside down for a month to get that last little bit, and you have a car payment?
Some simple math to put it in perspective:
$300 a month, every month, every year, until your 70, from when your 20.
By your 70th birthday (Congratulations, baldy!) you will have spent $300,000. And face it, in fifty years, due to inflation, $300 isn’t going to buy jack crap when it comes to cars. However, LLotC isn’t about living frugally, it is about living the high life without anyone knowing you aren’t spending that much.
So, you still want a bangin’ car, right? Here’s an idea. Get an awesome car new and drive the wheels off of it. This guy has a 1966 Volvo P1800 that has 2.6 million miles on it, and he is still tooling around in it. I can guess that he dislikes car payments. For giggles, I figured out that if you bought a new one for $3,970 and stretched the payments out from 1966 to 2009 (at 0%, because of your assumed excellent credit), you would be paying roughly $7.69 a month.
I’ll let that sink in. For less than your Netflix bill, for less than a bi-weekly meal at McDonald’s, for less than your damn monthly dog food allowance, you could be cruising around in your own classic car. Of course, you have to wait a long time in order for your new car to become a classic. You would have to endure those strange ‘between years’ when your car is too old to be new and too young to be classic, and everyone thinks you shop at the local Thriftko. The fact that you actually do shop at the local Thriftko has nothing to do with it.
Besides, do you really want to death-to-us-part with a car? What happens if the next year’s model gets two mpg’s better on the highway, or even, gasp, a soda-can Chill Zone? You’ll be left out in the cold (and your pop will be left inside in the warm) with your silly previous-year model. Or, even, what happens when the new lithium-powered hybrid-turbo’d diesel hydrogen heli-cars come out, and your stuck circling the city trying to find a Exxon-Mobil station without tree-hugging hippies out front protesting the last of the dead-dino sipping cars that are left on our sorry piece of planet?
This leads me to my next thought, and the one I adhere to religiously. Be sensible, try and find that car that apexes on quality, amount of miles, versatility, frugality, age, and because you are living largely, awesomeness. Example A, I have a 1996 Dodge Neon that had 108,000 miles on it when I scooped it up for $850 out the door. That has great value, but it is lacking in the awesomeness factor. So, I slapped on the AWD sign. While it will never be as cool as a new Lamborghini (which, strangly, doesn’t need a freakin’ “Chill Zone” to be desirable), I do try to keep it clean.
There are many more options out there if you are really looking to up the ante on the “awesomeness” factor. I will be telling them to you tomorrow on this two-part series.
Until then, I guess you could always walk.
