I found this piece to be pretty much garbage. OMG only rich people can get a ride from their wife!!!!
The article should have been: You gotta be a mechanic to own a cheap luxury/sports car.
The article should have been: You gotta be a mechanic to own a cheap luxury/sports car.
It's
* being a mechanic (so you don't have to pay $500 for a $200 job).
* having a job with flexible hours (This happens on the way to McJob and your late? McBye Bye.)
* having someone else dependable with a flexible job (Friday night and everyone know you know is working at McJobs?)
* having someone to take care of your kids so the kid is at home/daycare/babysitters and not freezing in your car
* having spare money so the choice isn't food vs radiator
* being able to easily adjust to different circumstances.
All of this revolves around the fact that he's in a good place, and able to count his blessings. If all you got out of this is "you gotta be a mechanic" then you need to re-read it.
"Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
"But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
"This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.” - Terry Pratchett, Men At Arms: The Play http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-ri...
I have a good friend that always struggled with money - rent, food, you name it... yet somehow has an expensive car with expensive insurance. He makes 1/2 what I do (or less) yet somehow drives a car worth 2/3x more than what I drive (just got a new used 2011 Honda Civic).
Generally you become, and stay, a millionaire by saving money. It's why so many people can win Millions in the Lottery and be broke a few years later. Getting money is only the first part. The second part is keeping it.
But yeah, the guy's problem isn't that he bought a used car. It's that he bought a used luxury car. They're not exactly designed for reliability or easy repair.
The Mcjob holder gets a ride, runs the risk of their kid getting cold, makes the choice between food and fixing their car.
They already do this.
I had a truck that was less than reliable in the past. I had all the know-how and tools to fix everything myself, and even had the money to buy the parts. But I shed a single tear and then traded it in for a newer, more reliable car because, while I was making good money, I had been sitting in my driveway at 8:05am still trying to crank the engine over a few times too many. My boss wanted me there at 8, not 9:15 when I was able to get a ride from someone else.
And that's half the point of the article. If your job demands you be there on time, you can't own a clunker even if you can afford to fix it and know how to fix it.
I blame the fact that while I am not personally a redneck, I am descended from a very long line of rednecks and can't remember a time when we didn't own at least one car that didn't run.
And that's not even counting the beloved "donor" cars. :-)
I also stick to the one pay check rule for cars, in that no car I buy should cost more than one paycheck, although I did make an exception for the van we use to haul the younguns around in.
There's something relaxing about spending a weekend under a truck, putting it all back together, and driving it around knowing it's only alive because you saved it.
What? You realize mechanics can make good money right? Most shops charge $100+/h.
Two friends who work as mechanics make $20/hr (senior-level) and $8/hr (junior level). Mechanics can make good money, just like programmers can make good money. But there are an awful lot of programmers out there making comparatively nothing.
I thought the author was acknowledging that he was better equipped to deal with those costs than someone else might be in a different life situation. And for those other people, it might actually make more sense for them to own a newer car even if it might appear at first blush that they were being less responsible with their money than we might think they should be.
In other words, there's no such thing as a free lunch.
It makes no sense to talk about costs of "owning a used car." The costs involved in owning a two-year-old midrange Toyota with 20,000 miles on it are completely different from the costs involved in owning an ancient luxury car that's driven the equivalent of to the Moon and back twice.
Buying a Lexus with 900,000 miles on it is so unusual that there's no way to generalize the story beyond it.
Basically, a two-year-old Toyota with 20k miles doesn't qualify.
In any case, there's a wide universe of cheap cars (and what exactly is the threshold for "cheap" anyway?) just as there is a wide universe of used cars.