Bye, car

I talk on occasion -- and I will confess with small pride -- of having once been poor. I am not proud to have been poor, but that I have surmounted it. Yet, it always lingers within me, the certainty that I am one unproductive week from poverty. This is demonstrably false. My savings account alone is twice what I earned a year when poor, but just you try fully convincing me that it won't vanish.

I had narrowed my car choices down to a few, two brands of car in two locations. One didn't get back to me quickly enough, so I opted for two dealerships next door to one another.

When I was poor, I spent money foolishly by necessity. I did not have storage space to stock up. I purchased affordable food, but boring, unhealthy, and/or cheap, so I was not much of a cook. I could not experiment because a misstep could not be worked into my budget. Once, I failed to make noodles for Hannah and was annoyed for an hour. First, that I somehow screwed up noodles, one of the easiest dishes. Second, I wasted that amount of money on the wasted noodles, which must have been under a dollar.

When I bought my last car, my red Sentra, it was the cheapest of the ones on my list, and Amber was irritable because she did not realize I intended to test drive that day -- something I did not subject her to this time. Yes, the Sentra had nearly a hundred thousand miles on it. Yes, it had a few dings. But I could buy it outright without much stress -- which was in itself startling to my poverty-etched brain. It came with no warranty, and the one they offered was nearly 50% of the asking price for the car, so I turned it down.

That cheap car had accumulating problems almost from the get-go. The first weekend, Daniel discovered that the back-left window was reluctant to go down. Once that was resolved, it was intermittently the driver's side one. I intended to keep it as long as I could, but that turned out to be three years, with a few thousand poured into it to keep it happy until that was impossible.

That cheap car ended up costing me more in those few years than had I bought a more expensive car with a warranty, with the added deficit that I would still have the more expensive car and wouldn't have to be purchasing a new one now.

In his Discworld books, Terry Pratchett explained Vimes's Law. In brief paraphrase, the rich man buys a pair of boots for $100, and they last for years in comfort. The poor man buys $20 boots six times in those years because they keep wearing out. The poor man's feet are wet and uncomfortable the whole time, and he has spent more money than the rich man for the privilege. But he never had $100 free to splurge on a pair of boots. How could he do otherwise but suffer?

Though far from the priciest option, the car I choose constitutes the most expensive object I have ever purchased, twice as expensive as my previous car. I expect it to last. On my drive to sign the paperwork, I outright feared that my Sentra might not make it. It is a relief to be in a vehicle that feels new enough, with under a quarter of the miles of the other one. I will trust better that this car will last long enough to be worth the expense, saving me money on a vehicle whose repairs -- which might not have been enough -- were over a tenth the cost of my new car and more than its trade-in value. I can put down a substantial payment without overwhelming panic, something my poor self would have found unfathomable.

I do not anticipate ever being as poor as I once was. With Amber, it seems close to impossible, though I am unsure what September will bring with my job owing to Cuomo's facility closures. I have applied to a few local schools, a couple of which I might actually want to teach in (one walking distance from my home) and the others just as insurance. I will have a job, even if it involves a maximum-security boys' facility where the state also intends to send both girls and boys from another facility with sexually harmful behaviors. In short, a powder keg is set to explode to make the papers and justify more closures. (It is a struggle to find a better reason to mix these populations.)

I am highly marketable at this point. I am not too worried that my money will dry up, especially with a side hustle writing for Grunge. With that alone, I am paying off my car loan, earning $1000 a month. Worst case scenario, I will increase my article output while finding a stable job once more. I am far from without resources and can splurge on something that may save me money in the long run.

Soon in Xenology: A new job.

last watched: Bob's Burgers
reading: The Last Unicorm