Life Is A Road. I Drive A Used Car.

“First principles, Clarice. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man you seek?” – Silence of the Lambs

The local bank in Modern Mayberry was robbed by a ghost – it was a polterheist.

Blog note:  I will be live blogging the debate on Thursday night along with The Mrs. but I cannot promise to drink as much as last time.  I’ll be here 15 minutes beforehand.  I’ll put up a post tomorrow for the liveblog.

As careful regular readers have probably noticed, I’m generally a strong advocate of living within your means.  That means not blowing all of your money on PEZ®, fast women (or slow men), and anything related to the movie Highlander II when your paycheck hits the bank.

If you look at life as a road, debt is a great valley.  Once you drop in, it’s very hard to get out, because the deeper you get in the steeper the valley walls are.  I mean, yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death Debt, at least it’s nice to get some time outside.

Even though I’m against debt, there are exceptions, unlike my “no exception policy” about dating married women.  The Mrs. gets a little irritated about that one.

Never date a girl with a lazy eye.  They’re always seeing someone else.

Houses don’t count, as long as you live in them and don’t consider them an investment.  I understand that few people have the cash to buy a house, so everyone gets a pass there.  Heck, I’ve paid off most of my mortgage, so now it’s officially lessage.

The other debt that is (again, generally) acceptable is a marketable education.  Does this include a degree in Grievance Studies, X-Box Couch Engineering or Snack Maintenance?

Of course not.  No business wants to hire those people, unless their HR department needs drones to be sacrificed to feed the Queen HR Bee her nectar.

The biggest killer to a happy life is debt.  It hangs over you.  When I was in debt, I thought about it several times a day, wondering how I could ever get out of debt.  Thankfully, no one really needs both kidneys.

Even worse than debt is the interest you have to pay on debt.  Not only do you have to pay back money you didn’t have in the first place, you have to pay more back.  Probably the only weapons greater in destructiveness in international relations than nuclear bombs are interest rates.  Oddly, it isn’t listed as an act of war to send in the International Monetary Fund to make loans to nations who can’t afford toilets.

My mother-in-law said her dogs liked to drink out of the toilet because the water was cool and fresher than the water in their bowls.  Then I began to wonder – how did she know that?

As an aside, I indicated once that I thought that a moratorium on all interest payments was worthy of consideration.  There was a huge pushback from readers indicating I didn’t understand how the modern economy worked.  In the meantime, European Central Banks have issued debt with a negative interest rate.  For those not paying attention, that means if you deposit money, you have to pay the bank for the privilege of depositing it.  It just shows the old story is true, give a man a gun and he’ll rob a bank.  Give a man a bank?  He’ll rob everyone.

Hmmm.  And I was told that I don’t understand how the modern economy works.  I think I’ll win this one in the long run.

Debt is a killer.  Many Americans borrow money for a cool pickup truck to drive to work to have enough money to pay for a cool pickup that they can drive to work so they have enough money to pay for a cool pickup so they can drive to work so that they have enough money to pay for a cool pickup . . . .  (Lather, rinse, repeat.)

Hmmm.

What do you call a fight between loan sharks?  A conflict of interest.

I did tell an employee that was reporting to me that I suggest that people never buy a new car unless they had a cool million, cash.  I stand by that.  There are reasons for that:

• Older cars last longer than almost every Hollywood marriage. Especially to Angelina Jolie and her coven of children stolen from each continent on Earth, except Antarctica, because there are some things that even penguins won’t put up with.
• Generally, older cars cost less to maintain than a Hollywood starlet. And they maintain their value better, too.  Ever try to trade Jamie Gertz for a ’67 Camero?  Zero takers.
• If you follow the N+1 rule (one car for each driver in the house who has to go to school or work plus a single spare for the whole family) your job is safe. You always have a car that works even if that car is older than Madonna’s first facelift.

Following this rule has saved me tens of thousands of dollars in car payments.  It has saved me tens of thousands of dollars in car insurance payments, tens of thousands of alimony payments to disgruntled starlets, and thousands in car taxes.  But it’s also a lifestyle – you have to be comfortable not having your ego wrapped up in cars.

That’s just one facet of turning down luxury.

My friends say I have a big ego, but enough about them.

Your income will fluctuate throughout your career.  It’s really okay to indulge from time to time, based on that income.  For me, that indulgence has been reflected in:

• Nicer wine. Not great wine, but not pruno, either.
• Amazon® doo-dads. If I saw a sphere of tungsten on Amazon™ and it was 2AM and I had a few beers, maybe I’d buy it (it’s on the sitting room coffee table).  For those not in the know – tungsten is extraordinarily dense, somewhere close to gold, but not as dense as a CNN® contributor who can’t tell if the Zoom© call is on “mute” before defending Sparta all by himself, if you know what I mean.
• Not questioning every purchase of The Mrs. When dollars are tight, the marriage has to be tighter, since every purchase is a joint decision.  Then I become, “why did you have to use two sheets of paper towel on that” man.  For reference, Jeffery Toobin only needed one sheet of paper towel.

But built into this is that purely fun purchases happen only if you’re debt-free with a good income stream coming in.  If not?  It’s a joint decision.  With projections.  And charts.  It takes a good marriage to deal with that.

The most important part of luxury is making sure that you can walk away from it.

Is my pride in my car?

Well, no.  Obviously.  My newest car is five years old and that’s The Mrs.’ daily driver.  The one I drive regularly was built just after they found Saddam Hussein hiding in a hole in the desert.  My ego isn’t wrapped up in my car.

I bought a cheese grater that was owned by both Josef Stalin and Saddam Hussein.  It was the grater of two evils.

One of my favorite stories revolves around a group of Dallas housewives who were at a kid soccer game.  All of the mothers are there with the latest models of cars from Lexus® and Mercedes™ and Audi©.  But one mother drives up in a ten-year-old Buick™ and drops off her kid.

“I wish I was like her,” one mother said to another, “so rich that she can drive an older car.”

I read a statistic a few years ago – I’ve never been able to find it again.  But it said that something like 70% of people driving around in a Mercedes™ had a loan on it.  Think about that – me in my old car with one light-second of miles on it, owned free and clear, has more money than the average Dallas housewife.

Pursuit of life for the pursuit of pleasure is, in the end, a meaningless pursuit.  The idea isn’t that the road is easy, the idea is that you have the strength for the road.  Pleasure isn’t a goal, it’s a side trip that should last a few days.

Then, back to the road.