Guns, Cars, and Tech

Category: Cars

  • About that car you have…

    [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKyV8CTHeJ0&w=420&h=345]

    I love cars. I think that’s why I’ve owned so many of them. I’m 31 years old and I have literally lost count of how many cars I have owned at one time or another. I remember having three cars at the same time shortly after I moved to Nashville.

    The thing is, the total value of all three cars combined was about $5,000. The most expensive vehicle I’ve ever owned was a 1997 C1500 that I paid $14,000 for in 1999. The cheapest vehicle was a 1992 Saturn SC1 my brother got for $300.

    Guess which one I lost more money on? The thing about a $300 or even a $3000 car is they’ve pretty much lost all the value they can. I had that truck for three years and got $6000 for it after having it on the market for about 4 months. I bought my 1999 Jeep Cherokee 4×4 with 95k on it for $4000 in 2008 and 50,000 miles later I can probably still get $2700 for it without even trying hard. $3500 if I detailed it. Even if you factor in the small repairs I’ve had to do I come out WAAAY ahead compared to someone who buys a new car.

    A lot of times people say they need “nice car” because they are reliable. Well, all cars are reliable until the day they aren’t. If you find yourself in an unreliable $1000 car, go find a reliable $1000 car! You could get a different $1000 car every other month and STILL be ahead of most people since even a non-working car will easily bring $300. (Though I don’t advocate this as a plan. Buying a car is a PITA because of all the government-mandated crap you have to go through.)

    One of the things we’ve sacrificed is newer cars. My wife drives an Accord worth probably $2500 and it’s exactly the car she wanted for the money we had at the time. I only pay cash for cars. If I need a new car and only have $1000, I buy an $800 car and then pay sales tax and tags. That car was a 1995 Plymouth Neon affectionately called Barney. I bought Barney in 2007, put 16,000 miles on him, and then sold him with non-working air conditioning for….$800. Barney was never in a shop, either. That was probably the best car deal I will ever get.

    I say all that to say this: You should probably sell your car if you ever want to get out of debt. That $500/month payment is just a huge boat anchor around your neck, and that’s not even considering what your insurance cost is. Do you know how much insurance is on an $800 car? Like $18 a month. I think I paid $40/month when I was single and under 25, because all you need is liability.

    And I gotta tell you, after driving sub-$3000 cars for almost ten years now, I would be uncomfortable driving a $30,000 SUV.

    Do I plan on driving $3000 cars the rest of my life? NO! Hell I’m probably buying a $7,000 car later this year and I’ll be slightly paranoid driving that one! The rule about anything with a motor is that, combined, the total value of all vehicles (including boats, ATVs, motorcycles, etc) should be less than half your household annual income. And you should pay cash.

    Will I ever buy a brand new car? YES! ABSOLUTELY! I have promised the wife that when we have a million dollars, she can get a brand new car. Since my retirement goal is somewhere north of $17 million, she’ll get that car eventually.

  • Notes from the weekend

    “Gone With the Wind” is a really, really long movie. I’d never seen it before and decided to remedy that. It took pretty much all day Saturday when you include the breaks we had to take for eating and letting the dog out. I now understand why he didn’t give a damn. I wouldn’t either.

    Lowe’s and Home Depot will sell you primed interior doors, but not painted interior doors. This seems foolish to me. They also come with the hole for the doorknob cut, but you have to make the cuts for the hinges yourself. This is a PITA.

    In related news, my office now has an unpainted (but primed) door with some really rough hinge cutouts. Previously there was just a door frame.

    Taking Casey on two 2 mile walks, shopping at Lowe’s and Home Depot, and going to the grocery store in one day is a bad idea for someone who generally walks only 3 miles a day in total. Getting old sucks. I can barely walk today.

    A friend of the wife went shooting for the first time on Friday. She and her husband went on a double date to an indoor pistol range where she shot his Glock 19. Her previous level of interest in guns was “He should leave a Post-It note on the shotgun with instructions on how to use it in case someone breaks in and I’m home alone. Otherwise, I don’t ever want to touch it.” Husband is new-ish to guns, brand new to handguns, and wants to get his carry permit. Based on the smiles in the pictures they sent us, she’s all-in now.

    The Logitech Revue Review will be forthcoming, but here are my initial thoughts: Can’t really say it’s better than my Home Theater PC running XBMC, but for $99 shipped from Amazon it’s pretty awesome. Eventually this will move to the bedroom when we buy a new TV for up there.

    I saw a really strange (and by that I mean totally awesome) recumbent motortrike. It looked like a custom-made machine. Chopper front end, V8 powerplant on the back, and the seat was maybe 4″ from the ground. Casey was in the car with me and she barked at the guy the whole time he was behind us.

  • You know what I haven’t talked about?

    Cars. So here we go:

    Lexus has released a Lexusified Prius, called the CT 200h. It’s $30,000 for the base model, has 98hp, gets 43mpg on the highway, and has a 0-60 time in the 10 second range.

    For $4,000 less, I’d rather have a TDI Passat that gets the same mileage.

    Of course, I haven’t paid more than $4000 for a car since 1999, so it’s not like I’m likely to buy either one today. Four years from now after they’ve lost 60% of their value to depreciation, however….

  • New digs

    After posting for a little over two years at Walls of the City, I’ve decided to open up my own little shop.

    I want to publicly thank Linoge for allowing me to guest post over there. Through my association with him I’ve gotten to do a bunch of cool stuff and meet some good people.

    I’ll be forever grateful to him for getting me started in all this.

    Over here on this new site, I’m going to be talking about some other things as well. Yes, you’ll still get guns and libertarian-ish politics, but I’m also going to be doing more geeky stuff. The site title comes from an observation that my wife made several years ago. She noted that anytime two guys get together, they will talk about guns, cars, or computers. Maybe all three. I broadened “computers” to “tech” because a lot of the things I’ll be talking about don’t really involve computers–like phones and DIY CNC machines.

    Posting tempo will probably be light at first, but go ahead and add me to your RSS Reader! If you decide to keep up with the full site, please note that I’ll be doing theme and layout changes pretty regularly until I get a handle on this.