Buying a car...?
A friend of mine and I were talking at the bar while consuming a toddy for the body. The conversation went like this...
"I gonna buy m'self a new pick-um-up truck." Says my friend.
"I see. What's wrong with your semi-new Jeep Wrangler?" I reply.
"Startin' to use oil," He says. "Bout...oh...a quart every eight or nine hundred miles."
"But isn't your Jeep paid off?" Says I, cocking an eyebrow [which I'm famous for, by the way -- eyebrow cocking, that is].
"Yeah, but that there usin' oil business will eat me out of house and home. Can't have no car runnin' out of oil and freezin' up an engine doncha know. Them engines is spendy." Says my friend, nodding his head sagely. He does the nodding thing whenever something is knowable, but strangely unknowable at the same time, like the Theory of Relativity for instance. The Relativity thing had him nodding his head for an entire semester in high school.
I said, "You got a point there. Engines are expensive alright. How much you spending for the new rig?"
He says, "Only $38,500.00. Got the guy to come down from $42,500.00."
At this point my friend is smiling like a cat that caught a fat rat; like he really put something over on the dealership and the salesman.
"Hmmm," says I, the good times killer of all noble thinking. "Thirty-eight-thousand-five hundred dollars. Do you have any idea how much oil you could buy for that much money?"
My friend did not see the humor. :-(
The point, of course, is our buying priorities. This guy had a perfectly good automobile. He didn't need a new pickup, but he had to have a perfectly 'rational' reason for spending $38,500.00 on something he didn't need. We do this all the time. We go to a grocery store and con ourselves into buying something expensive and tell ourselves we "deserve" the extravagance. I do it, you do it, probably every person you know does it to a greater of lesser degree. Why? Why do we spend money on things we don't need? It simply makes us feel good...for a time, until the bill comes due that is.
I have nothing earth-shattering to share in this diary today. I was just pondering spending habits of the not-so-rich and definitely not famous folks like myself and maybe yourself also.