If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, then you remember the disaster of a time that I had getting my Honda Civic fixed a few years ago. That experience has me sworn off of buying a Honda ever again. It’s just not going to happen. So when the time came around that I needed to buy a brand new car, I knew that I wasn’t going to go to a Honda dealership that screwed me over a few years earlier. Actually, I wound up going to the Ford dealership that is literally across the street from that Honda dealership (so take that, idiots at Honda!).

You can read the link above to learn more about the financial aspect of me buying a new car. This entry is being written to describe the story of why I had to buy the new car in the first place. And it all started with paying Sears Auto Center way too much to do… nothing.

A whole group of technicians inspecting my old Honda Civic

The picture above was taken sometime in early February at the Sears Auto Center in Ocean Township, New Jersey. As you’ll notice, the technicians are all standing around trying to figure out what the problem is with the Civic. This picture was taken on one of the third or fourth visits I made to that place – in about as many days. As I recall, the Civic was driving very shaky for a few weeks, but that wasn’t something that I didn’t expect for a car that was entering its twelfth year of service. Look, these cars start to make funny noises after a while – it happens!

After getting totally dicked over by the local Honda dealership (again, see the link above), I decided to go to the local Sears Auto Center to see if they could help with the weird feeling that I was getting from the Civic. They figured out that there was some belt that could use replacing, but that it wasn’t really the primary problem with the weakness that I was feeling from the engine. I asked them to go ahead and replace the belt and then we’d see if it helped with the general lack of “umph!” that I was feeling from the car. So… the guys kept the car for a night and replaced the belt. I got the car back the next day and went about my merry way.

Until the car stopped right in the middle of when I was driving it. On the same day I picked it back up from the shop.

Now don’t get me wrong – the car didn’t fishtail out of control on the highway and leave me stuck fending for my life against on-coming traffic or anything like that at all. Nope. Instead, I was driving the car on one of the major highways in my area (I believe it was US Highway 195 heading towards Trenton) and the car just stopped delivering power to the powertrain. The way I described it to the folks at the repair shop when I brought the car back to them was that I would be driving along at 60, 70, or 80 miles per hour and then I’d go to hit the gas again and nothing would happen. The car would just begin gliding. My way of combating that glide was to pop the car into neutral and work my way over to the shoulder and ultimately the median. The odd thing, though, was that once I allowed the car five or six minutes of “off” time (complete with me cursing and being furious inside the car), it would start back up and the energy would go back to the powertrain and I could travel for a short while again.

Bizarre.

And that picture above is of the mechanics and technicians checking the engine to see what the problem could possibly be. Suffice to say, they couldn’t figure anything out and told me to go about my business with the car. The guy who manages that shop was a nice guy and said that I should bring the car back in the event that it randomly stopped again. So I thanked him and went about my way.

A day later I was getting the car towed from my home back to the Sears Auto Center. That’s right – the car stalled out again. And, without going into the boring details, the guys at Sears Auto Center couldn’t figure out what the problem was again. I managed to drive the car off of the lot and back to my place with no problems. Maybe, I thought, the problem was over and I could actually drive this car to work without any problems. The next day came and I began driving the car north on Route 18 towards my new office and – you guessed it – it randomly stopped working again. After pulling off onto the median and getting the car to start again, I drove it to one of my coworkers’ houses that was on the way to my office and he led me to a local garage where he took his cars to get fixed when they were broken down.

My coworker had been working with that mechanic for quite some time and had a great deal of faith in him. I explained to the mechanic what the problem was and he asked me to leave the car with him so he could inspect what was going on. In the mean time, my coworker took me to the local Enterprise Rent-a-Car and I rented a gigantic SUV until my Civic was back in full working order.

And here’s the most frustrating part of leaving the car with the mechanic – two days went by and he didn’t find any problems with the car. Like the guys at Sears, the mechanic said that everything worked well on the inside of the car and that he even test drove it around town and didn’t have any problems. At this point, I got the impression that these car people were beginning to think that I was nuts or something. Anyway, after dropping the rental car back at the Enterprise on a Friday morning, I was dropped off at the mechanic to pick up my car and begin the drive home.

Do you want to guess what happened next?

If you guessed that I began driving south on Route 18 and the car randomly stopped again, then you win! Correct! As I was sitting on the median of Route 18 (again) thinking about how totally f’ing inept these mechanics must be to not be able to figure out the problem, I began to realize that I needed a new car. Remarkably, the Civic was always uncomfortable, always too small for me, and I was never really happy driving the car. What the Civic was, though, was a free car with great gas mileage that fit into my financial preference of aggressive student loan repayments and my professional circumstances of having to drive hundreds of miles each week for work. As I’ve been engaged in this aggressive student loan repayment program, the Civic was the best option for me.

These were some of the many thoughts swimming through my head as I sat on the median and came to the realization that my next stop would have to be at a car dealership to start shopping.

The car dealership was my next stop. While I was driving the car home (the thing miraculously started again after five minutes of sitting on the median), I decided to stop at the local Ford dealership. I’m not going to get into the details of the 5+ hour negotiation that led me to purchase my new 2012 Ford Escape Limited Edition (the first brand new car that I ever purchased) or the fact that I spent over $1,000 getting the Civic “fixed” that week, but at least now you know the story of why I had to get a new car. In my world, when the car you’re driving breaks down six out of seven days in a week, you need to get a new vehicle. I couldn’t imagine driving on the Garden State Parkway for work and being over the Driscoll Bridge and having the car lose its “umph” like that – talk about a major, significant accident waiting to happen.

And that’s the story of why I needed to buy a new car.

That’s it. That’s the secret. Budgeting works.

Through the magic of budgeting you can achieve some pretty amazing financial goals… like paying off about $90 thousand of student loans over an intense, focused three year period. However, we all know that life is a fluid adventure and sometimes the tides change. And when the tides change, sometimes financial goals are forced to change along with them. And thus we have the meat of today’s entry…

I bought a brand new car yesterday!

Actually, I didn’t buy a brand new “car” yesterday; I bought a brand new SUV. It was a 2012 Ford Escape Limited Edition, to be exact. And although the picture above isn’t exactly the Escape that I bought, it is the closest thing that I can find online to the model and color of the Escape that I purchased. In fact, my new SUV looks very similar to the one in that picture.

And yes, there is a larger, longer story about why I needed to buy a new car. I won’t go into the details of that decision right now, but I definitely will tell you the story in an upcoming entry on the blog… so stay tuned!

Purchasing this Escape a pretty big event for me for three reasons. First, it’s the first brand new car that I’ve ever purchased. Second, it dramatically alters my strict budget. And third, there is a new level of certainty in what used to be a very expensive part of my financial life. Before I woke up this morning, I woke up every other morning of the 13+ years that I’ve been driving and had a bit of an apprehension about the car I was driving. Sure, that apprehension was much less pronounced when I lived at home with my parents and right after I purchased my 1999 Chevrolet Blazer, but for the majority of the time that I’ve been driving I’ve been driving a beat up old car that just made it between trips to the service station.

If you’ve never been in that type of position with your primary method of transportation, then take it from me – it sucks. There’s nothing that makes a driver of a beat up car’s stomach sink faster than driving along and hearing a weird noise out of nowhere. Whenever that happened to me, I didn’t get frustrated with the machine (because that’s just crazy), but I did get annoyed because I saw money just flying out the proverbial window.

But along with my new car, I made sure to get a 5 year/100,000 mile extended warranty that covers pretty much anything that could go wrong in the car. It also provides an incredible amount of “other” stuff that comes in handy like free towing, free roadside assistance, free gas fill-ups if you run out of gas, free rental cars when the Escape is being worked on, and so on and so on. I know most people say to stay away from these types of warranties, but I’ve had my cars breakdown too many times and been left between a rock and a hard place that I knew purchasing this extended coverage was the right thing to do.

Oh, and last week I became a member of AAA at the “Plus” membership level. I think I’m about as covered as I can be!

Like the picture above, this one is not a direct image of the inside of my Escape. Instead, it’s a standard picture of the interior of an Escape Limited Edition that I found online. This is pretty much what the inside of my SUV looks like – including the nice touchscreen display in the center. There are a lot of buttons and functions on that touchscreen – I have to sit down to figure them all out. One thing that I know for sure is that there are a lot more functions available with this Escape than are available with the Ford Fusion. And that’s not a knock on the Fusion, but when I sat down in both machines – I knew that I wanted the Escape.

And that was an odd realization, too. You see, when I was negotiating to buy a new car yesterday, I was negotiating with the salesman to buy a brand new Fusion. It wasn’t quite the color that I wanted and it wasn’t quite the model that I wanted, but the price was reasonable (just north of $20 thousand). However, as I sat there waiting for the salesman to come back from the owner of the dealership I realized that I was negotiating for the wrong car! So when the salesman came back I told him to forget about the Fusion and get me a price for the Escape.

After owning the car for about 24 hours, I’m glad I made that game time decision. It was absolutely the right thing to do.

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The reason that I wrote this entry, though, was to let my readers know that this purchase alters my student loan repayment plans. By sticking to an aggressive repayment plan, I hoped to have my student loans fully repaid by December 2012. However, now that I have this machine to pay for, that timetable changes. I owe a little bit less on the truck than I still owe on my student loans so it is an easier debt for me to get my mind around and conquer. Once I receive the final financing papers, set up my online payment account through the finance company, and make my first payment I’ll have a better idea of how much I have left to repay on the car. Suffice to say, it’ll be slightly over $25 thousand for sure.

I have no intention of stopping my student loan repayments (which I could do because of how much I’ve overpaid to date). Instead, I intend to readjust my budget and pay off both the student loan and the car in a reasonable, quick, efficient fashion. A good budget is able to change with the tide.

Again, I won’t go into the gory details of how I was left with no choice but to buy a new car. That brief story will be released on the blog in an upcoming entry. However, I’m glad that I purchased the car that I wanted and didn’t just “settle” for any car on the lot.

As you’ll see, the feed contains just random thoughts, complaints, and observations. I’m not solving world hunger here, folks – I’m just living my life!

On the topic of what is going on with this blog there’s nothing major to update everyone on, but here is the general rundown:

First, for some reason we’ve been receiving a large number of spammy comments. Now, I write “spammy” comments because these comments aren’t your typical “click here for drugs” robotic spam comments, but rather vitriolic hate speech that is actually written by a human being. It’s really some pretty vicious stuff that has no place on a personal blog. And I don’t know how many times I have to write this in the comments section, but this always has been and always will be a personal blog. In other words, what I say goes so if you write a comment that attacks another commenter or blatantly distorts the issues presented in the various updates, you can stick your comment up your ass. Now granted, in the last year we’ve only gotten about 6 or 7 really vitriolic, arrogant, hateful comments and all of those were moderated before they made it on to the site. However, if you plan on writing bullshit and hate in the comments section you might as well save yourself the time because it’s not getting posted, period. My personal blog, my dictatorial rules – very simple to understand.

Second, I have a lot of content written and ready to be posted to the blog, but I’m waiting for the right time. For example, I have my next student loan update written and ready to go for whenever my total amount outstanding drops again (which should be in about a month – more on that in a minute). Also, I’ve been working on some other projects that are taking up some time so I’ve only been writing for the blog in my spare time.

Third, I’ve been working really hard to cull and delete a ton of the tags on this blog. If you don’t know what a “tag” is, it’s the keywords that bloggers use to help their individual pages categorize themselves and rise up in the search engines. A few years ago I utilized a system that provided a whole host of tags for specific keywords and that has bogged down and crapped up the database for the blog. As an example, if I wrote something about my old Chevy Blazer, I would get the following tags added to the database: Chevy, Chevy Blazer, Blazer, Chevrolet, Chevrolet Blazer, Blazer SUV, SUV, Chevy SUV, etc. That’s totally unnecessary. My culling process is reducing all of that gunk to two tags: Chevrolet and Blazer. That’s it – nothing more is needed. Obviously, this is a long process since there are some 6 or 7 thousand of tags in the database that need to be reviewed and deleted. I’m going through them about 250 at a time and I hope to have the project completed by the end of the year.

And the final part of this part of the update is that I’m looking for ways to freshen up the design of the blog. If you’ve been eagle-eyed, then over the last few weeks you might have noticed random updates here and there in certain design features (the addition of the Twitter feed, the lengthening of the Facebook feed, the layout change for news from the other sites that I own, change in some of the external button links, etc). However, I’ve been thinking that it might be time for wholesale change – I just don’t know how far I want to take it. If you have any ideas on how to change the design, please feel free to add them to the comments section of this post (but don’t post hate or it won’t get to see the light of day!).

That’s it for the JerseySmarts.com Update. And before I end the web-based updates I thought I might add that one of the sites that I own through Usable Web Solutions, LLC has really exploded in the last month and a half. Hits to that website have tripled and it is growing into a very respected site. I’m proud of the team that works there and plan to continue providing them with as much support as possible to let the growth continue. As for the rest of my life…

Things have been very busy. Towards the end of January my company moved its offices from Trenton to New Brunswick. That’s about ten miles less of a drive each morning for me, but the same amount of time thanks to the Route 18 traffic (which sucks). However, I tried to bypass most of the heavy traffic by changing my work schedule from 9am-ish to 5pm-ish to 7:45am-ish to 4:00pm-ish. I’m getting up earlier and leaving my house about an hour and a half earlier, but I’m also getting home right at or slightly before 5:00pm, so that’s an hour and a half earlier than the Trenton commute. The change hasn’t been too bad, but when you shift your schedule to work (and live life) an hour and a half earlier, you experience a personal seismic shift.

On my end, I’m finding that I have less time to spend on the computer in the evening (not playing around on the computer, but working on computer-based, paid projects). Also, I find that I’m totally exhausted by about 3:00pm. I think this is happening because my body isn’t used to going to bed at 10:00pm so I wind up tossing and turning for about a half an hour (though I’m totally beat right now and expect to sleep like a log tonight). It’s a change and I’ll get used to it.

Also, we’re getting towards the end of the college basketball season and I’ve been busy attending the Monmouth University men’s basketball team home games. The Hawks have struggled a little bit this season, but they’re starting to show signs of strength heading into their last four games of the season. Oh, and unlike the last few years I don’t really have a ton of pictures to post from these home games. I’ve actually been sitting back and enjoying the games instead of waiting for the perfect camera shot. However, I have taken a small handful of pictures at the games (mostly of the scoreboard after the games are over) and I plan to post them in the next few weeks.

I’ve also been hit with a variety of big expenses in the last few weeks. First, I spent a good deal of money traveling to Washington, DC for a business trip last week (granted, these expenses will be reimbursed, but I have to wait for the reimbursement to arrive). Then, I had my car crap out on me and it cost over eleven hundred bucks to get the thing fixed. And on the same day that I paid to get the car fixed, I co-hosted a fundraiser/donor recognition event at one of the Monmouth home games (which wasn’t a huge expense, but still an irregular expense in my routine budget). While all of these expenses are manageable, they are all irregular costs in my planned budget and they all hit within the same three day period. So… I’m glad that tomorrow is pay day!

Between the big shift in my personal schedule and the time I’ve been spending at the Monmouth games, my health is more or less in a stalemate. I haven’t been to the gym in about three weeks because I can’t figure out this new schedule yet, but my weight hasn’t moved too much and my blood sugar is very stable. I’m glad about the blood sugar being stable because a shift in routine combined with a reduction in the amount of medication that I’m taking could have formed the perfect storm to throw my blood sugar out of whack. On the topic of health, I purchased the Rebel Fitness Guide from Nerd Fitness a few weeks ago and I just finished reading it. Any guy who writes fitness articles and quotes the Lord of the Rings, uses Legos as a graphic tool, and frequently references the video games that I grew up playing and other nerdy topics is alright with me! I expect to begin the Level 1 Rookie workout around the beginning of March so be on the lookout for updates on how I’m progressing with that workout program.

Other than what’s posted above I don’t have many more big updates to provide right now. One of the last originally-written posts that I wrote for the blog was about finding a new church to attend that is close to where I live. Well, I’m still going to church there on a weekly basis and I find it amazing that I used to think that I didn’t have the time to go to church. Absolutely amazing. The services last about 45 – 50 minutes and when you factor in driving there and driving home, I’m only out of the house for about an hour and five minutes each Sunday morning. Who can’t give an hour and five minutes to go to church each week?! In fact, I continue to find that I enjoy going to church to listen to the homilies and the readings and so on. It’s nice – makes you feel good after you leave and gives you guidance for the week.

I’ve also been reading a lot on the NOOK, in The Word Among Us daily meditations, and random articles – so I have a lot to update on the site when I get a moment to do so! Stay tuned and in the mean time, follow me on Twitter @JVince81!

Smashed down to $49 thousand

For example, let’s say that for some reason one of my roommates has to move out. That would bump my portion of the rent an additional $300 per month or $3,600 per year. Well, before I begin to send thousands of dollars down to Washington, DC to repay my student loan debt, I want to be sure that I’m in a position to be able to pay for any increased costs that may come my way. A more likely example of an increased expense is having to purchase a new car. As I wrote about on here a few years ago, my Chevy Blazer died in August 2008. Since then, I’ve been driving my Mom’s old Honda Civic. I’ve managed to run up the mileage on the Civic to about 140,000. And while I understand that Civics are built to last a long time, 140,000 miles is still a lot of mileage for a car. In the event that I need to buy a new car, I want to be sure that I can put a substantial down payment on the purchase instead of just a few thousand bucks.

So I’ve been spending a lot of time and effort bolstering my cash reserves. Thus far (and without going into any detail), it’s been a pretty successful enterprise. The end result of this success is my being able to slowly shift my focus from building up the reserves to decimating the remaining student loan debt… and that’s what I’m beginning to do.

Stick around at JerseySmarts.com because I’m going to start kicking the balance of this student loan’s ass really soon!

In May 2006, I graduated from Rutgers University with a Masters Degree and $120,720 in student loan debt. After completely repaying over $61 thousand in student loans (not counting interest) from the federal Perkins loan program, the New Jersey Higher Education Student Assistance Authority, and CitiBank, I currently owe $49 thousand to the United States Department of Education’s Direct Loans program. Follow my student loan repayment story on JerseySmarts.com.

So that had me thinking about some of the best Christmas gifts that I’ve received in the last few years. I’m not going to go through the trouble of defining what “best” is for this blog entry, but you’ll get the picture as I go on. “Best” probably has something to do with the utility of an gift, but I’m not defining the word.

The rechargeable batteries and recharger are a very handy gift and one that I use every month. What I also like about this gift is that it saves me a ton of money since I happen to have a bunch of electrical items that use batteries. With rechargeable batteries and a recharger ready to go, I really don’t have to purchase batteries any more. It’s great!

My Mom gave me a Fossil watch a few years ago and I love it. Not only do I love it, but I’m constantly getting complimented on the watch with everyone saying that its boxy style not only fits my wrist, but matches my clothing style, too. I really like that watch and it’s probably the best one that I’ve ever owned in terms of quality, too.

One of the girls that I work with gave me a green striped tie last year and I really like it for a few reasons. First, it’s a quality silk tie and it was the first green tie that I added to my collection. For a guy whose favorite color is green, you’d think I’d have more green ties, right? Second, the tie goes well with my black dress shirts, white dress shirts, and yellow dress shirts so I get a lot of use out of it. Being able to wear the tie with a variety of different shirts and styles definitely adds to its utility factor!

Last year or the year before (I can’t remember), my younger brother gave me a small shop vacuum. Now, I haven’t had many opportunities to use the shop vac, but I did fire it up a few times and I have a bunch of projects that really do require the use of the shop vac in order to be completed. For example, the trunk of my Honda Civic is packed with little bits and pieces of “stuff” that you can’t really pick up and take out (it’s a long story – we’re talking piles of rusty nuts and bolts and pins and pebbles and all of that type of little stuff). When I get a chance to finally clean out that trunk, I won’t be able to get the job completed without the shop vac. Plus, I always wanted a shop vac when I was in college – and now I have one.

Last year my older brother and his fiancée gave me a new leather wallet with my initials engraved on it. This one’s interesting because I was shopping for a new wallet right before last Christmas and I really couldn’t find one that I liked (I’m partial to the Fossil brand and I didn’t see anything that I liked in their lineup at the time). However, getting a personalized wallet from my brother and future sister-in-law was a great way to take an otherwise simple decision out of my hands (because I would have unnecessarily agonized over it). And the wallet is pretty durable and stylish, too!

A few years ago my Mom picked up a Black & Decker toolbox for me and it’s another one of those items that I use regularly. As I’ve begun to build up a small tool collection, now I have a place to store everything. Any guy living on his own in a post-collegiate/post-graduate school atmosphere can tell you that he probably has a bunch of tools in a bunch of different places. Well, with the toolbox (which I dip into at least once each month, if not more) I have all of my stuff in one easy to access convenient spot.

And I can’t forget the wireless presenter that my Mom gave me a few years ago. If you’re wondering what that is, it’s more commonly known as a “clicker” for when you’re showing PowerPoint presentations to groups. So as you might imagine, I use this clicker twice a week when I’m teaching my classes. It’s great and allows me to pace the room while I teach.

It’s hard to say that some of the other gifts that I’ve picked up over the recent years aren’t among the “best.” For example, one of the senior staffers at my office last year gave me a handy little screwdriver kit and I’ve probably used it ten times in the last two months while a buddy of mine is borrowing my electric screwdriver. Also, my Mom is good for picking up some books for me each year and I absolutely love reading through them (though I haven’t gotten through as many in the last year as I planned). I also pick up a few gift cards each year and who doesn’t love being able to use those gift cards to pick out their own “stuff” from the stores?

Anyway, now that I have this thought out of my head I guess it’s time to start building my Christmas list for 2010…

The car I drive is a 2000 Honda Civic which my Mom bought brand new and kept in really good shape. Then, in his last few years, my father started to drive the car and my younger brother started to drive the car around the same time, too. Somehow, the jack system that I would be using to fix this flat tire wasn’t totally intact. This is good news to find out on the side of 195 when it’s pitch black and freezing out and I only have a thin sweatshirt! Damn it!

So, I’m on the side of the road with cars whizzing by at 65 to 80 miles per hour with a jack that doesn’t quite get the job done while freezing my ass off. Like any good man, though, I figured that I can make this work. So I pull a pen out of my glove box and start turning the jack (which I put in the wrong place) to raise the car. As you may imagine, the plastic pen doesn’t last too long before it’s busted. So, I start searching my car for something that might be able to turn the knob on the jack and raise up this car. Lucky for me, I still have some of the tools from my visits to the organic farm in my car. While digging through the equipment, I found some hand tools – specifically a garden cultivator. For those of you that don’t know, a garden cultivator is that three pronged thing that looks like a claw.

At 5:30pm last night I was on the side of 195 with a garden cultivator turning a jack that was in the wrong place freezing my ass off. Wonderful. Did I mention that the tires were also held in place by lugnuts that were put in place via air-compressed hand guns? Yeah – those things weren’t moving for my tire iron…

The story takes a great turn at this point. After about ten minutes of essentially doing nothing on the side of the road, a Department of Transportation worker pulls over behind me and pretty much changes the tire in a matter of 5 minutes with ridiculously high powered tools. His jack has the leverage of a 4 foot pole that picks up the car with no problem at all. Plus, this guy has an air-compression powered hand gun and blows out the lug nuts in seconds. I tossed my tire iron deep into my trunk so I can forget about it.

The Department of Transportation worker placed the donut on my car and had me heading back home in no time. Actually, I wasn’t heading back home because I clearly needed a new tire. My destination from 195 was to the Sears in Ocean Township. The kid at Sears was nice enough and showed me different types of tires. Then he asks, “Do you just want the one tire?” Now, I now that you’re supposed to buy these things in pairs so I said, “No, give me two. Actually, can you see if I need to get four tires?”

To this kid’s great credit, he went out and checked my car and did not take the obvious bait. In other words, you would expect any salesman to say, “Yep! You definitely need four tires!” without thinking twice. This kid told me that I only needed two new tires, but that due to my extended commute (about 100 miles per day) the other two would have to be replaced in about a month or two. The kid was honest enough and he made enough sense, so I bought four brand new tires as well as the Sears roadside assistance or some such stuff. Whatever service I purchased yesterday, it allows me to have my tires replaced by Sears for free. And since I bought a set of Sumitomo tires that have a guaranteed 75,000 mile lifespan, the warranty should come in handy.

At this point, though, the story takes a bit more of an aggravating twist. No, it’s not the fact that it took these guys two hours to change my four tires (because what I really felt like doing from 6:30pm to 8:30pm was walk around the local Target and Sears while my tires were changed). The aggravation comes in the price. I think, overall, I received a good price on the total package – it came to $402. That’s not a really bad price given the product and services that I purchased. However, getting smacked with such a large expense the week before Christmas pretty much ends my Christmas shopping. Luckily, I purchased a few items for the people on my list last weekend so I do have some gifts to give out. Overall, it’s pretty aggravating, though.

And there you have the story of my night last night.

I’m the king of problems with cars. Over the last few weeks, my car has tended to rumble a little bit when I go to start it each morning. I figured that it was no big deal. Then the “check engine” light popped on a few days ago. I thought, “Oh great. Here comes a few thousand dollars of aggravation.” Frankly, I don’t need this type of shit from my automobiles. I get them serviced frequently and I never drive them into the ground. I digress…

I brought my car to the Pep Boys down the street and they said that it needed a larger servicing that involved the spark plugs and everything so I was fine with that. Something else needed to be replaced under the hood – not sure what. All in all, the cost estimate came to $780.

This is the problem with my f’ing finances. I manage to build up some extra funds that I can apply towards my ridiculous student loans or saving to buy a house and some bullshit occurrence happens. Either my car breaks down or I have to buy new glasses or whatever. This is crap!

So my car is now in the shop…

Well, to round out that story – my car wound up costing me something like $760 and it has run very smoothly ever since I got it back from the Pep Boys. They do a good job over there. I am, however, still hoping that nothing crazy happens with this car because I don’t really want to go out and buy a new one.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, last night’s deep freeze has rendered those snow covered roads to be ice covered. Great…

When you put all of this together with the fact that I’m now driving a Honda Civic instead of a Chevrolet Blazer, you can see why I’m more restrained about making the hour long trek across New Jersey from Tinton Falls to Trenton. Ain’t happening today.

And let’s be real – I definitely do not get paid enough to put my safety on the line to get to an office where my work is more “appreciated” than valued. Seriously. If I had a dollar for every time someone said thank you or that they appreciated my work, I’d double my salary! I don’t want to start down that path right now, though…

So I’ll be working from home again today while the folks in this development try to dislodge their heads from their asses and figure out how to make the main road drivable!

This indicates that if the Big Three go bust it is their bosses, insular and stuck in their ways, who should be held most responsible. Put simply, for too long they had built bad cars, which were inefficient, unreliable and unattractive and Americans did not want to buy them.

The man makes a point. Everyone knows that foreign cars are much more fuel efficient, definitely more reliable, and usually more stylish than their American counterparts. Let’s put it this way, Ford didn’t earn the nickname of “Found On Road Dead” out of nowhere.

A few years ago (2002) I purchased a 1999 Chevy Blazer. The price was around $15,000 – give or take a few hundred bucks. First of all, the price was way too high for a three year old automobile. Second, since I purchased this machine, I’ve probably put an additional $15,000 into it in repairs. And of those repairs, about half of that expense was to pay for labor!

But the thing is, I’m one of many drivers who have had a financially negative experience with the American automakers. On the flip side, though, I’ve been borrowing my Mother’s spare 2000 Honda Civic for a few months now and not only does it get 31 – 33 miles to the gallon where the Blazer got 18 miles to the gallon, but I’ve not had one problem with it. I drive a lot for my job and since I borrowed the Civic I’ve put about 5,000 miles on it – no problems. With the Blazer, though, traveling that much almost certainly meant that I needed to stop at the shop one weekend for minor repairs.

American made cars are poor quality, energy inefficient, and cost way too much to manufacture. Unless these core problems change, they’ll never reclaim their former dominance in the market.