Car Hunting

Hope­fully, I wrap up the car hunt today. It is always an inter­est­ing jour­ney. It also serves as a real­ity check. In my case, I remem­ber the high fuel prices of last year. My intu­ition tells me that it will be back in some form again — prob­a­bly soon. It also tells me that this time it will be a per­ma­nent fix­ture in con­tem­po­rary living.

So, you begin your quest. Before you know it, you begin to be dis­tracted by mod­els with less gas mileage but more bells and whis­tles. The num­bers on the page begin to increase and even­tu­ally just appear as num­bers. They no longer rep­re­sent real money. You get tired. You wear down. You for­get your orig­i­nal pur­pose and intent. You buy some­thing you never orig­i­nally intended to buy. Your insur­ance agent looks at you in shocked dis­be­lief and gasps. You have just defeated yourself.

It is dif­fi­cult to keep a clear head when it comes to pur­chases. Before you know it, the process becomes attached to your ego, and you start imag­in­ing how you would look in this machine or that one. The ego is in the game. Money is no longer an object. It is merely a means to ego-enhancement.

I no longer impulse buy (been there, done that, paid the penal­ties). Sales­peo­ple do their rou­tines (filled with all sorts of manip­u­la­tions) and I smile kindly and make my own choices. I read the reviews and eval­u­ate my needs for ninety-five per­cent of my dri­ving needs. Things are tools. Sure, I like nice things. I also like liv­ing below my means. It frees up funds for other nice things in life.

One of the things that is really great about being a mid-life per­son is that no one can sell you any­thing. You can see through any ver­bal game. You know the tac­tics. You are more prac­ti­cal and know the value of a dol­lar. Most of all, you know the dif­fer­ence between what you want and what you need.