car

October 3, 2012

“Give up my seat? With pleasure!”

The other day, speaking with one of the few personal finance bloggers who doesn’t want to see us drawn, quartered, and fed to narwhals, we got on the topic of public transportation. (Alright, it was her. She’s a sweet gal: don’t hold it against her that she associates with us.) We each concluded that we’d rather crawl wherever we were going until our knees were bloodied and infected than get on a bus.

When you’re 11, riding a bus (solo, anyway) is awesome. You’re away from your parents, and you have the freedom that your 10-year-old sibling who’s stuck riding with mom and dad doesn’t yet enjoy. Sure, where you can travel is still limited (by the bus driver, the connecting routes, their schedules, your curfew), but if you’re plucky enough you could theoretically hop a Greyhound to Belize and start a new life. Even if you don’t, public transportation still beats the hell out of being stuck at home or in the passenger seat of your mom’s Scion.

But you know what happens? Most of us grow up. We want wheels of our own, giving us a new kind of autonomy that that 11-year-old bus rider can barely comprehend. Hopefully, you haven’t forgotten this yourself. Wherever you’re reading this, there’s nothing to stop you from getting in your car at 3 a.m. tomorrow and driving wherever you want to. That’s a liberty that most of us take for granted, so much so that we don’t even bother thinking about exercising it. “Are you crazy? I have to work that morning and I’d be dead tired. Can’t show up at the office groggy. What will people think? Besides, I was out late last night, almost 7 p.m.”

What does this have to do with money? Everything.

Those of us who drive do so because we like self-determination. It’s not that we necessarily like paying $4-something a gallon for gas, sitting in traffic, nor burning fossil fuels and turning the planet into a premature Venus. The last of those is irrelevant, and the first 2 aren’t even up for consideration. A car lets you go wherever you want, whenever you want. For that degree of freedom, $4 a gallon is an unbelievable bargain.

Most of us don’t live in Manhattan (thank God), Tokyo or Singapore. There’s no subway station outside the door. And even if there were, we’d still have to share it with people. You folks who think that riding public transportation is the greatest gift you can give to the planet short of buying carbon credits don’t know what you’re missing.

Did you know you can save $12,000 a year by not owning a car? Gas, insurance, repairs…

So you’re saying that for just $12,000 a year, I can come and go as I please? Have somewhere to store certain stuff as I run errands throughout the day? Keep warm in the winter and cool in the summer? Listen to music I like while going where I’m going, as loud as I want? Go on a roadtrip next weekend? My God, cars are the most amazing deal ever. You just said so.

We’ve progressed pretty far as a species, but the fundamentals of off-roading via public transportation continue to elude us. Buses and subways traditionally steer clear of sand dunes, mountain passes and 4WD roads.

Transporting cargo. You know what you can do in an SUV that you can’t do on a bus? (No, aside from that. Grow up.) Go to the supermarket and buy a week’s worth of groceries, for one thing. How you central business district metropolitans can survive carless, and thus limited to the amount of groceries you can carry in your hands, is beyond us.

The only reason to take the bus is if you don’t value your time. Drive 20 minutes somewhere, or take an hour including multiple transfers to save a portion of that $12,000 a year…it’s up to you. Now if you’re a kid who’s too young to drive, your time is pretty worthless anyway. You still have decades ahead of you, which you can squander first by going to college, then by paying off student loans. Besides, if you’re under 16 you have no choice in the matter anyway.

Those of with places to go and people to see – you know, adult interests – realize there’s only an ever-diminishing finite time in which to get things done. Knowing that, why on Earth wouldn’t you do so as efficiently and quickly as possible?

An advanced city is not a place where the poor move about in cars, rather it’s where even the rich use public transportation.
– Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogota

The best part about pithy quotes? You don’t have to elaborate on them! Like the ones attributed to Einstein (World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones, if bees die out humans will follow them within 4 years, etc.) While losing nothing in the translation, the above Twitter-friendly sentence (8000 or something retweets) is simultaneously provocative, unexpected, and devoid of sense. Rich people don’t sacrifice autonomy and self-determination, neither to have a boss push them around nor to wait for a bus. That’s what makes them rich.

The next time an idealistic idiot tells you that driving cars is a social ill, run him over. Driving and maintaining a car says that your time is yours to cherish and make the best use out of. Taking the bus says you’re poor, a manipulable automaton, or both.

Painless Change, More Money (Yet Another One)

May 23, 2012

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here

Control Your Cash Trivia Time!

Which will lubelessly rape your wallet the fastest while leaving the deepest scars?

Incurring credit card debt
Having children
Going to a car dealer for repairs and parts

The answer is 2, of course, but that doesn’t make for as interesting a blog post as if we assume the answer is 3.

What turns most people off about personal finance is that so much of it is about economization. Go without, deny yourself one of life’s immediate pleasures, and maybe in the future you can enjoy a slightly greater pleasure. No wonder so many people just give up and decide to indulge themselves immediately.

But this is different. Here at Control Your Cash we consistently urge you to make painless choices that you won’t even notice after you’ve spent the initial few seconds making them.

Like the idiots we see waiting in the drive-through lane at Starbucks every morning. Yes, the “latte factor” has been analyzed to death already, but it’s still valid. These people not only pay 2000% markup for the privilege of patronizing Starbucks, they wait in line longer than it would take for them to brew their own coffee. So they’re not even purchasing convenience, however much that’s worth. They’re wasting money simply out of habit.

Log into your car insurance account, and your health insurance account while you’re at it, and check your limits. You’re probably overcovered, and throwing money away each month unnecessarily. Once you reduce your limits, you won’t be suffering through the privation of having reduced coverage. You’ll be saving more money, again with minimal effort, and all for a few minutes’ work. We’re not talking about forgoing that Fijian vacation you’ve been working towards and desperately wanting for so long. We’re talking about doing practically nothing and getting more money out of it. All because you were a tiny bit more cognizant and aware of your surroundings than you were before.

Which brings us to our multiple-choice quiz answer. Why do car owners go to the dealer for service? Because they don’t know any better, and because it’s convenient. Also, if you bought your car new, the dealership almost certainly offered you a free oil change and tire rotation or two when you closed the deal. Sometimes, depending on how naïve you look, they’ll go so far as to insult you by offering services that even Baker from Man vs. Debt could perform on his own. Like replacing windshield wipers, for instance, as if that’s something that anyone with opposable thumbs couldn’t do.

Merchants have been offering “free” goods and services for millennia, and still people get suckered in. It’s not that the merchants are necessarily cheating you, but rather that you need to take into account what they’re selling you beyond the free stuff. Free socks with that new pair of sneakers? Maybe, just maybe, and you’re not going to believe this, Foot Locker factors in the (minimal, to them) price of the socks and still makes a tidy profit off you when you buy that pair of Reebok RealFlex CrossFit Nanos.

Even without the free oil changes, the dealer relies on your presumed comfort level to make you a lifetime customer. The friendly man who sold you the car? There are even friendlier men working at the dealership as service advisors!

Of course they’re friendly, you’re responsible for financing their fishing boats and summer cabins.

We’ve discussed it on this site before, and elsewhere, ad nauseam. Like the time we priced a job that included replacing both sets of front brake pads and the calipers, cleaning the rotors and bleeding the lines. The dealer quoted $871.45. Oops, left my credit card at home. It’s the darnedest thing. How about I bring my car back this afternoon?

The shop down the street offered to do the same job for $398.34.

Only with rare exceptions should you take your car to the dealer. For warranty work, obviously, but beyond that the reasons you should let the dealer touch your car are selected and rare. Resetting the factory satellite radio unit, for instance.

Even the most meaninglessly inconsequential items are cheaper just about anywhere other than your dealer’s service department. Case in point, Motorcraft Part 15K601:

Price on FordOwner.com, $55.71

Price on Amazon: $7.50.

Damn, those internet retailers really are killing Main Street. We didn’t even think about visiting the neighborhood mom-and-pop key fob store.

Once more, repeat after us:

Poor people are poor largely because they choose to be.

It was only a few years ago that “comparison shopping” meant driving across town and burning a day or two to find the best deal. Today, that’s not an issue. While reading this post, there’s nothing to stop you from opening a couple more tabs and finding meaningful savings on your next purchase of whatever. The money you save, you can buy assets with. This is how you get rich. There really isn’t much more to it.

This article is featured in:

**The Carnival of Personal Finance 364: The Art of PF Blogging Edition**