If you ever find yourself with a little extra time in your day, I recommend checking out insurance auctions. Are you a YouTuber with a thirst for putting random words in all caps? Buy a dirt-cheap luxury car from Copart and rescue it for those warm, fuzzy views. Do you ball on a budget and can wrench? Your next chariot awaits. The cars on Copart tell stories, be it a supercar that drowned in a flood, a totaled Maybach, or an illegal import with an incorrect VIN. None of that will prepare you for these fun puns.
Today, David wrote about a Maybach 57 that fell from grace to end up crashing and covered in dust at an insurance auction. This super sedan had a price of $305,000, but today is worth just $45,029 and will probably sell for way less than that. Mechjaz is not sure about bidding:
Would I buy it? Maybach, Maybach not.
Taco Shackleford makes a great observation:
Its Benz a while since a good pun chain happened.
Your wish is my command, V10omous!
Bring them bach!
Mechjaz returns with more punnage:
Introducing the Maybach T-800: I’ll Be Bach
Fantastic, I love to see it! For our final COTD nomination of the day, we turn to Matt’s Morning Dump, which contains a story about how 1 in 5 vehicle sales last quarter involved a trade-in with negative equity. Now, it’s easy to draw assumptions about the car buyers who did this, but the truth is you just don’t know the situations of those people. Further, this nation should do better to teach financial literacy. Spikersaurusrex opens up and tells us a story:
Financial literacy is sadly something a lot of us (especially me) learn through making mistakes. I grew up in a poor family (single parent, usually under the fed poverty line, etc.). In my family, if you could afford the payment and qualify for the credit, you could afford it (car, furniture, whatever). I know now this is not true, but this is what I learned growing up. I wasn’t taught the cost of credit or how to make good financial decisions, so when I got out on my own, the first thing I did was buy a brand new geo metro for $200 per month for 5 years, at 21% interest. The math wizards out there will understand that I paid $12,000 for a terrible car with an MSRP of about $6,000. Worse yet, I didn’t know anything about maintaining a car, so it died a horrible death just a few years later. I mean, who knew oil had to be changed? I also made mistakes with credit cards and when I was 28 years old, most of my income was put to rent and debt service. I could barely afford food, even with a decent job. This is why people get into the trap of rolling one mistake into another. There’s no money to save because it’s all going to interest. Something happens and you incur additional debt. Your car breaks and you roll one mistake into the next.
I read comments blaming the individuals who make the mistakes, and, yeah, they are ultimately responsible and should have known better, but maybe, as some have suggested, basic financial literacy should be taught in school. It might not eliminate the bad decisions, but it might prevent some of them.
One of the arguments I’ve seen against including financial literacy in school curriculum is that the information is easily available on the internet. This is true, but if you don’t know you’re making bad decisions, why would you look?
I learned from my mistakes and it took me years to recover. I can honestly say I didn’t know better at the time. Maybe I was a victim of predatory practices; maybe an adult should have said, “Slow down there. This is a bad idea!” Ultimately, I was a victim of ignorance, my own and my parent’s.
Those are wise words. People shouldn’t have to learn financial literacy through mistakes or through predatory lending practices. It can be better! Have a great evening, everyone.
I’ve taught adult financial literacy courses for years. Even smart people are woefully under-informed and under-educated.
“the first thing I did was buy a brand new geo metro for $200 per month for 5 years, at 21% interest. The math wizards out there will understand that I paid $12,000 for a terrible car with an MSRP of about $6,000.”
Now that we all have a calculator in our pocket, thanks to smartphones, it takes a few seconds to do the following :
Monthly payment x Number of months = Total to pay.
And then compare that to the MSRP
Even with down payments and final payments it’s still not hard to work out
So why don’t people do this simple calculation and see if they’re paying a fair price or being ripped off?
I really think that there is a portion of the population that thinks “monthly payment” and thats it. Pretty much what the author said above. I’ve had two close friends that were car salesmen. That is what they said about most of their customers. “What’s it going to cost me per month?” They said they wouldn’t even bother verbally telling their customers the length of the loan or APR. And neither would they ask.
It’s really strange to read yourself in the COTD column. Thanks for the shout-out.
Those puns are much more entertaining than my drivel.
Hey, your drivel sparked a lot of good discussion. I bit my tongue somewhat with some of the comments coming through, having been raised in a mostly single parent (with rotating guest slot for whatever stepdad was handy) + 4 kids. We were so, so broke, kiting from pawnshop to pawnshop to hawk my mother’s dwindling possessions for gas and groceries.
I’m sure there’s some scolding to be done about four kids and pawning engagement ring x, y, and z, but it also doesn’t change the fact there were times the entire operation of our family was funneled through an extremely untrustworthy Legacy or the Ram van we had for a while. Buying a 1998 Mazda Protege in 2000 marked the newest, fanciest car we had ever owned, and a least let my mom get to work consistently. A loaded Excursion on an 84 month term would have been insane, but just one little pebble sized foothold – relatively reliable transportation – is a requirement in much of the US.
It’s something people do lose sight of, or never knew, growing up with food on the table every night or in cities where you can still get to work or school without a car. It’s the hazard of “I deserve something nice” that perpetuates the delay of actual luxury: freedom from worry and stress about such fundamental things.
But yeah, we ate the expired cast-offs from the Merita bread store and National Guard dispensed, government-grade peanut butter for a while there. I can see the upgrade to velour seats feeling like such a small, earned mercy. The membership tiers here kinda hit me in a core memory, because the Mazda had velour seats and it really was so so much nicer than the 36-grit burlap in the Ram van.
Anyway. I’ve rambled out and back again, but I enjoy the meaningful takes, and the stories we share, as much or more than the puns and dad jokes.
Thanks for the kind words. I’m always surprised to see so many people sharing the same kinds of experiences. Cheers.
I remember government peanut butter. Came in a white can. Typically, the top of the jar had a dry layer of peanut butter crust that had to be scooped off with a knife before the edible portion could be accessed. It tasted strangely bland compared to the store-bought stuff.
Sorry I missed the thread that had your COTD. I liked it, glad I got to read it here.
Life is full of a lot of unknown unknowns. It’s one thing to seek out information you know you don’t have. But the shit you don’t realize you don’t know will bite you in the ass.
I get the stance of “should have known better” but there’s a world of difference between someone who has the information and still makes the bad decision and the actually ignorant who lack the background. OK, yeah, someone probably should have taught the lesson learned the hard way. What do we do when that doesn’t happen? What are we gonna do to keep it from happening to someone else?
My kid is teaching my 13yo grandkid financial literacy. Interesting to watch. Grandkid is pressure washing garbage bins for $. After one grueling wash, gk asked to go to a fast food place for some dinner. When informed that the cost of the food was about the same amount as was just made. Lightbulb time.
Universal adage: You don’t know what you don’t know. The more you know, the more you understand that there’s a lot you don’t know.
Personal anecdote: I had a job where my skill was trending toward less demand. My employer offered cross-training and diversification options, but it was all on me to make it happen. My supervisor at the time was a terrible mentor, and I had no idea what resources would help me progress.
I came out okay, but that’s coming from someone with education and an employer who at least pretended to care and offered resources.
As others have said, we definitely need to include financial education in primary school and abolish time change! (I have more impulse purchases during the 1-2 weeks after time change than any other time of the year, including Christmas.)
I really appreciate Spikersaurusrex’s comment (and username). A lot of people grow up in environments where there is very little opportunity to learn important life skills. My parents were working class, they knew nothing about college or financial aid, and my mom declared bankruptcy while I was in college.
There are sooooo many dumb financial decisions I made b/c I had to learn the lessons the hard way. I’ve jumped a few socioeconomic classes from childhood to adulthood and it makes me VERY cognizant of the learning opportunities my kids are exposed to that I wasn’t.
tl;dr: let’s try not to be judgy dicks about others’ decisions
This here! Thank you.
I’ve made plenty of mistakes, living way beyond my means on credit, buying too much “stuff” etc. Completely ruined my credit in my 20s. It was so bad back then a car dealer told me new wife and I that even with her perfect credit, so couldn’t cosign for me and they’d be wary of taking my cash.
Fast forward two decades give or take, and a LOT of learning, mistakes, trial, error, hard work, and strategy on my part and I have equity in a home I bought two years ago. A decent (but still not enough) retirement savings, two newer cars that are paid for, and a decent emergency fund that could easily cover us for 18 months. And this was after having to rebuild again starting in 2012 when we lost around $200k on a house in Vegas (perfect market timing the wrong way) and our credit got dinged for 150 points overnight at the short sale.
When I look at people making poor financial decisions, I don’t judge them so much as see myself a while back and wish them less pain than I had rebuilding.
This sounds like my life. 🙂 Glad things are working out!
I learned from my parents’ mistakes, and I’ll just leave it at that…
Why don’t we teach financial literacy? Simple, because there’s big money to be made taking advantage of financial illiteracy. Greed is king, the great money piles rule over all and demand their tribute.
I am not sure where you went to high school but I was in NY state and we HAD to take a class called “Government and Economics” to graduate. I graduated in the early 2000’s so it was a while back. Anyways, this class went over local governance and things like IRA’s 401(k)’s, investing, borrowing and interest. I learned a lot of good stuff in that class but I will say that there were a bunch of kids that could have really used that information but just didn’t pay attention or acted like dicks in class. A good number of them went on to make bad choices as adults.
It is a classic case of “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink”.
We were behind the times here, even for 1996 (when I graduated). They still offered girls only home economics classes where they were taught to cook, sew and take care of babies because women were expected to grow up to be housewives. For boys we had wood shop. Or you could take typing, which was co-ed, but we didn’t even have any computer classes. That’s the closest we got to learning how to manage a household.
You mention wood shop and TBH, I wish I had taken it. I took all the science classes I could because that was my major interest. I ended up with a career as a chemist but now, I do some amateur woodworking as a hobby. Wood shop would have given me a head start and maybe got me into the hobby a few years earlier.
I like to do woodwork too. It’s a satisfying and rewarding hobby. I understand wood shop classes are disappearing and that’s a shame.
I remember the days of middle school. Students making weed pipes in the wood shop class, then using them in the Boys’ room when no one was looking. Good times.
Here they went to the school’s designated smoking area with their shop class weed pipes. Just another example of how we were behind the times like I mentioned earlier in this thread.
My middle school didn’t have a designated smoking area. Before I ever attended that school, to “prevent” drug use, the administrators even removed the stall doors from the Boys’ bathrooms… which didn’t work. All it accomplished was assuring that any student that needed to poop got bullied while at their most vulnerable.
I hated that school, and the thought crossed my mind of burning it down when I was a student there.
I imagine things have only worsened since then.
Wood shop was a highlight of my experience there. I learned how to do drafting with a pencil and paper. I also had a civics course in high school, something that very rarely gets taught these days. Another thing that I used to enjoy that seems to be going extinct are advanced math classes. I went into college ready for Calculus II, when most high school students now days aren’t exposed to anything beyond Algebra.
The best part about school wood shops is that they have all the tools you don’t at home. Most people aren’t going to have space for a giant table saw, band saw, planer, dust removal system, etc. unless they’re doing it professionally, but the school had all of that for free.
Haha yeah. I put my table saw, bandsaw and planer on wheeled carts. That way I can tuck them in the corner and bring out one at a time. There’s never enough space in the garage/shop.
I graduated in 2001 in NY and would have loved this class instead of getting absolutely crushed by terrible financial decisions that even now still linger in some form or another. I really hope this is still a thing in schools because that’s really what we should be learning growing up instead of the bullshit I learned that I’ve never used in my adult life.
I didn’t even start saving money until my mid 30s. I’m so far behind everyone else in terms of retirement savings and I’m trying my damnedest to catch up but it is what it is. Now I try to impart what I’ve learned to the younger generation in hopes that they learn from my mistakes. I’m basically a walking cautionary tale. Haha.
Those bad financial decisions early on just keep kicking you in the crotch. I’ve found it’s best not to dwell on how things could have been different. You’re probably not that far behind your peers as far as savings; you might be surprised how many people have nearly no retirement savings. The important thing is that you recovered from the decisions and that you’re smart enough not to make the same errors again.
You’re right. A lot of people do live beyond their means and don’t think about their future. We have all seem the average price of new car loans and length of those loans.
Hmm. Maybe it was just my district that class, I had thought it was state-wide. We are right around the same age and I also feel like I should have started earlier. I went the long route through college and it took me a while to get established in my career. We all have thosetemptations to spend the money just as fast or faster than it comes in. I had to automate my savings or I would be tempted to buy another motorcycle or junk car.
I wouldn’t be so sure. The statistics about how many people have basically no retirement savings in their 30s and 40s are shocking. It’s not ideal of course, but you only lost a decade or so which is not catastrophic. Lots of time left for compound interest to work its magic.
That’s what I’m working on. Interest and dividends lead me forth! Haha. I’m actually trying to get to a certain dollar amount in dividends a month to supplement everything else I’m doing. I’m not anywhere close to that number yet but I’ve got a few years to hopefully achieve that goal.
I love me some dividends. I only got into it last year but I have found a couple companies with secure dividends and try to buy enough shares that each time they pay a dividend it buys one or two shares. The goal is to keep doing that and have my company 401k plus a monthly dividend income.
Good luck buddy. Hopefully the world will survive long enough for us to retire.
Good luck to us both! I only started getting into dividends in late 2021. I’m already earning a small amount monthly (almost enough for a tank of gas depending on prices) but now the goal is to take what I earn in a year in dividends and turn that into a monthly amount and then I have a handful of other dividend goals I’m shooting for. If I even reach half of my final goal I should be okay but I want to have a buffer for whatever life throws at me.
I wouldn’t count on it. But dividend stocks are IMO better than letting your money sit in a low-interest checking account.
The question one should be asking is whether the compound interest is going to outpace the real on-the-street inflation rate. This rate has been gamified by the consumer price index to appear less severe than it actually is. Compound interest on most investments, even conservative ones like IRAs, used to slightly exceed the real inflation rate, but I don’t think that’s been the case for about a decade now, and in order to truly come out ahead, on has to make increasingly risky investments. The more money you have, the less risky things tend to get…
In your 30s you shouldn’t be invested conservatively. You have a long enough time horizon to retirement age that you can ride out market volatility, and the overall returns for the riskier investments will easily outpace inflation. Once you’ve accumulated enough to retire (or close to it, anyway) you can start moving money into safer places where it may not beat inflation, but it also won’t lose massively either.
My investments are of the more risky variety. I’m not confident that even conservative investments will still bear fruit decades from now or even remain above a value of 0, as there are multiple systemic problems in this country and pertaining to its currency that have not gone addressed when the need arose decades ago and will not go addressed. Extreme volatility in everything long-term as this society continues to crumble is my prediction. Who knows though? I do have investments, just in case, and would prefer for them to pay off and for the world not to go to shit.
I’ll be happy just to get a plot of land to live on. But that’s getting harder to do as well. Everywhere I look, even 20 miles from the nearest town, some county government wants me to build a minimum 2,000+ sq ft home up-to-code paying all of the fees/taxes/permits along the way and connect it to electricity and municipal water at my own expense before I can legally live on it, so that they can put me $250k+ in debt for a McMansion I don’t want or need, just to extract property tax revenue from me while the banks extract interest. Everywhere I’ve looked, I am barred from just putting a small trailer on it; they’ll only let me do that in a mobile home park paying some Wall Street vulture capitalists $600+/mo in lot fees plus property taxes there. And I’m not paying $1,000+/mo to rent a box of an apartment somewhere either. Screw all that.
The entire point is to go off grid, pump my own water from a well, generate my own electricity with solar panels and homemade wind turbines using them to fuel home-built electric vehicles, and keep my living expenses as low as possible so that I don’t have to spend the rest of my life constantly working to make someone who is already rich even richer. To have stability without needing to have lots of money to maintain it. But that is increasingly not allowed, because rich assholes and government bureaucrats alike feel entitled to everyone’s money plus the time they expended to work for it, and will use the threat and force of government to extract as much of it as they can.
“Land of the Free”, my butt.
So I’ll continue making $100k+ a year working from home and laying flat(as they call it in China) in a family member’s basement on the cheap, stacking my money. My personal spending contributes less than $15k/year to GDP. The less money other people get from me, the better. I just hope I can put it to use before inflation eats it away(and we may possibly get hyperinflation).
Once I get my own land, I do plan to get some nice cars. A Lotus Elise or Alfa Romeo 4C are toward the top of the list. I could buy one right now in full, but I don’t currently have a place to keep it.
I think it’s great that your school had the class. Mine either didn’t have it, or I was not aware of it. This is one of the problems with each school district in the country determining it’s own curriculum; what’s deemed important to teach is largely a function of the individual interests on the local school board. But, that’s a totally different discussion.
FinLit should be taught in all schools and is in some districts. However, like so many things, there are those that foolishly view it as something not worth paying teachers to do.
FinLit/LitFins 101: Monday lectures will focus on financial literacy, while Wednesdays will be an in-depth study of taillights of the late 1950s. Instructors: M – TBD (Bankman-Fried, S. unavail); W – Torchinsky, J.
It should be taught in every school, and should also be a requirement for all students. My high school had “life accounting” class that was a senior year elective for most people. There were about 12 people in the class when I took it, and all of them were already going to college/had parents with FinLit knowledge.
As I said in another comment, when I was a student, all kids in NY state had to take a “Government and Economics” class that had a LOT of fin lit stuff in it. A lot of the kids who didn’t pay attention were the ones who many years later complained that nobody told them that 20% interest was a bad idea.
Financial literacy should be taught, I have worked in retail banking, as a mortgage broker, a bankruptcy consultant and a financial advisor. The level of knowledge is woefully low among all levels of education and employment. People don’t understand interest rates, amortization or balloon payments, they focus solely on payment and the future be damned. When I sold mortgages when the interest rates were stupidly low I told people it’s not if but when they will increase and set them up with additional payments to give them a cushion, almost all of them cancelled them and went with the minimum, they would tell me about the great deal they got on hot tubs, trucks and timeshares, the latter not an asset,
Agreed. The notion that just because information exists somewhere else, it shouldn’t be taught is absurd. Or, more cynically, that an entire economy is based on enough people not knowing it.
Sadly I think the last sentence is true- I still work in the financial industry and the number of people who work there and don’t understand what I consider simple math is appalling.
If you can do basic 7th grade math(not even algebra), you’re in the upper 1/3 of the population here in the U.S. Let the implications of that sink in.