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Today was quite odd. Amy and I, increasingly sicked with the greed of daily American life, have strived lately to move ourselves into a position of less desire of and dependence upon material things.
[Not that such a philosophy remotely stopped me from buying the hat you see me wearing in my new picture at the left... Carla's right, I look more like some salty old professor with each new photo. Either way, hats are (and have always been) a weekness of mine that I'll probably never shake.]
Contributing to this move away from such a lifestyle is that we've seen what such dependence has done to the livelihoods of so many people, including our parents. Our parents, neither set of which are by any means poor, are always broke because they spend so much of their money on things they don't need. In fact, by most measures they're fairly well off, but they've been so tempted by material things that some months they have trouble making bills. We're hoping to avoid that cycle, and we're trying to train ourselves now. Additionally, we really are broke half the time and have no business spending what money we've actually got on crap we don't need.
With this philosophy in mind, we went shopping for a new car tonight. Before the protests start, let me explain. I acquired our Impala in January of 2004, when the end of my time in Indiana was nowhere in site, getting married again was an idea I'd pondered but not stomached, and working on a PhD wasn't yet imagined. Gas at that point was $1.60 a gallon at your normal Muncie outlets, and a full tank would cost me about $26.00. Beyond that, I was teaching four classes at Ivy Tech and I was doing pretty alright. And you know that new cars always get better mileage than later on... the Impala, starting out, was in the mid-20s in-town.
Fast forward two years and three months. I'm making less than half what I did in my last three semesters in Muncie, and while Amy's contributing more than ever, it doesn't make up that difference. Our house costs more, which is to be expected. However, our utilities cost more, our groceries cost more and feeding our car costs more because of our country's marvelous overdependence on fossil fuels. At $2.94 a gallon (what we paid today), a full tank is around $50.00, which lasts the Impala (now getting 14 fucking miles per gallon in-town!) about eight days.
You can see why we'd want to unload the fucking thing. Unfortunately, as we found, we are trapped into a lease, which means we're stuck with the car until January of 2008 or we'll face one hell of a termination fee. What we're going to have to do is keep the thing and purchase it after the lease is over, because sure as anything we'll be way way over on mileage.
However, in our investigation tonight into acquiring a smaller car that more fit our needs, we discovered that even with such severe negative equity problems that the Impala represents, we could (if we wanted) get approved for the car we wanted based on our credit. The payment plan sucked pretty bad (most of which was caused by the negative equity of early termination) but we could get it. So that was the good news: our general financial discipline over the past few years had allowed the ambiguously created number representing our worth in the American system, likely stored on some computer in Bangalore, to increase to the point that we could easily buy into the system again if we chose to do so. We're finally making ourselves good in that way.
Still, stay away from leases. Once you're into that system, you're stuck as fuck, and you can never get out.
Now, we're sticking (stucking?) with the Impala, but our alternative is even more of a rejection of the system. Amy's looking into taking the bus to work a few days each week, and I may be able to do the same, though my change will involve a bit more work to come to fruition, since they're in two different counties and they don't really work together. We're looking to do more of our general-purpose driving in the bug. The Ped, when everything's working just right, gets around 34 in-town. Right now, he's getting around 25 because his fuel line is a little fucked up. I've really gotta look into that, which I'm hoping to do in the morning.
If I wake up in the morning... it's late and I can't sleep. Some things never change...
Posted by Your Friendly Neighborhood DJ on April 25, 2006 12:38 AM | Permalink
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