Gut Check

It's not a flex to tell you I don't have a car payment. I've had the same car for six years, so that doesn't seem uncommon, but it's possible that's because I'm just an oldhead. Apparently these days, the kids out there are doing stuff that makes me feel afraid and disoriented on the regular like TikTok, butt lifts and taking out car loans for a term of 84 months.

I didn't finance at all, not because I'm some kind of rich guy who just buys new cars out of pocket without a thought. The way less sexy story is that, if you have the right kind of anxiety, even if you've had the same job for 14 years, your limbic system won't let you be unconvinced that you aren't on the brink of losing it and, by extension, all of your value, both economic and human because I'm an American and that's how utility is measured. Remember, we're the same people who volunteered to sacrifice our olds to the spirit of Adam Smith when COVID first rocked up and threatened to keep people from hitting up the Whataburger whenever they felt like it. Human life is still sacrosanct, sure, but in Texas at least, only before it's out of the uterus.

When my old Prius heroically electro-farted itself to a slow-rolling death on the side of a road in Claremont, California, in 2015, the idea of facing down a long-term financial encumbrance (with compounding interest!) was already enough to make my face go numb. Add to that the idea that I couldn't even live in the thing if my income evaporated since it would be technically owned by a bank, it all became intolerable. And that is how an otherwise fiscally responsible adult decides to essentially empty out his savings in order to buy a fat Mini Cooper all at once. Yep, staved off anxiety about having a financial safety net by clearing out my nest egg for one big-ticket item. I said "responsible" not "math-savvy." Though it largely turns out the two things are mutually exclusive.

For someone with that type of anxiety, this is a fraught economy to try to navigate. Everything is a subscription model now. At some point companies figured out that a fixed amount of money in a short period of time (sometimes just all at once) is less desirable than a steady stream of potentially infinite monies forever. I've always been skeptical of the treadmill model of payment obligation. Note that I never considered leasing a car, the first and most successful version of this subscription scheme. Never stop paying for a thing you never get to actually own. I almost get it with a car (not what you'd call reliable, persistent value), but man, it sure seems less like value for money when suddenly it was, like, fucking Microsoft Office.

It's the one and only way things are going, disguised as a lot of other things, like planned obsolescence. There's a new iPhone every year. If you finance and replace, you basically never stop sending Apple money for... what now? I looked up the difference between iPhone 12 and iPhone 13; seems to be that one is "powered by" an A14 Bionic processor and the features the (wait for it) the A15 Bionic processor, an upgrade designated by names of things given by Apple to an Apple thing. But see I'm smart, I upgraded my iPhone 6 to an iPhone 12 by paying for it out of pocket. With my credit card and it's, like, 22% financing rate. Another definite win. Come at me.