Car Trouble

I hate cars. I hate how they look, how they smell, their maintenance, their upkeep, their little quirks, their painful annoying habits such as lights on the dash coming on, going off, and you wondering what those lights stand for. I mean, when's the last time a Check Engine light came on, and you checked the engine?

Okay, the smell is all right. But really, cars represent how to get from A to B for me. That's all I need to do. If they're comfortable or roomy or good on gas, that's just gravy. I've driven some real pieces of shit in my day, and did it bother me? Nope.

So now me and my family are in a dilemma. There's a funny thing that happens once kids come around: Everything that happens to you happens to your family as well. The lines that once seperated boyfriend and girlfriend, husband and wife, they are gone, replaced only by a scant grey haze that now serves as your existence. Each event in your life enters this fog and either does great things or fucks it up. This is what I talk about when I say everything that happens to me happens to my family.

So we have two cars. Two cars that we cannot afford. One car, in fact, that is such dead weight it is astoundingly bad. It is a 1998 Mitsubishi Eclipse with 106,000 miles on it. That alone tells you that no one, no one will be buying this car anytime soon. Not only is it a plasticy, scratched up, burning-oil piece of crap, we owe about double its current value.

But on the other side of the coin, we have my Camry, the 1999 Camry LE with just 77,000 miles on it, runs great, and only has a little quirk--the driver's side window doesn't roll up, it gets hung on the liner. This is easily fixed with an afternoon at my father's.

Ah, but there's a catch. You see, the Camry has been reconstructed from a 'totaled' state. This means that it was bought by an insurance company, sold at a dealer auction to my father, fixed up like new, and sold to me at cost (the benefits of being his son and all). When I got said Camry, I wasn't quite aware of its trade-in value at typical car lots. My father tried all he could to not get me to go to a car lot when I told him I had an intention of doing so. Why? You'll find out in a second, and those who know cars will already see this coming.

The reason for this mixup is that one, we can't all ride in the Mitsubishi. The thing redefines tiny, especially for my big ass, and trying to put a toddler, an infant, me and Ericka in the same car would be a disaster to say the least. Also, the insurance is atrocious. To compound that, the interest rate on Ericka's car is just nasty in today's loan environment, where no loan really needs to be over 7% unless you've done something horribly, horribly wrong. Or haven't refinanced like you should.

Let's take all these factors, all these variables, and throw in a letter I got from the state of Tennessee. Here is the summation of said letter:

Dear Evan, you have had 4 traffic violations in the last year. Another one and you lose your license. If you don't take a driving course within 90 days you lose your license. Love, The State

Don't you just love politics?

So let's take my godawful driving skills, my terrible luck at said driving violations, the shitty Mitsubishi and my Camry that has a reconstructed title and figure out how to solve this mess.

Here's a quick formula for figuring out the value of a car with a reconstructed title: Take the trade-in value of the car and divide it in half. There ya go.

Did I know this when I bought it? Hell no. Had I known it was that detremental I wouldn't have bothered as I got my car paid off in full when I totaled my last Camry last June (May?). I knew it would hurt the value, but never to this degree.

So the we went to a few car lots. The first was Herb Newton Nissan and the second was Carmax. Let me draw up an analogy: The first is like cheap Mexican wine. The latter is like a fine French Merlot. Get my drift?

Carmax is fuckin awesome. Their people are friendly, a little money hungry, but that goes with the territory. You should see the absolute wolves that reside at the Nissan place. It is freakish. This one guy there, he was such a stereotype I thought I was in a bad movie. We're talking late forties white guy, too skinny and too tanned. Very little hair, but what was there is slicked back and oiled. Squirrelly and strangely menacing. The only thing he was missing was a gold tooth. These guys are creeps, sharks, and should be abandoned as quickly as possible.

Carmax on the other hand is a great little shop, and they don't hide anything from you, such as the dreaded "Finance Manager" at every other car lot, also known as "The richest motherfucker in the place" who, even in East TN, pulls in over $200,000 a year. Yeah, that's no typo.

So after all this rigamarole I found out one term that I hope to never hear again: Negative Equity. What is Negative Equity? It's when you owe too much on your shit. The loan can't hold the value of the lein. You're upside down. You're basically at the mercy of fuckwads like Herb Newton Nissan to offer you shit for your existing cars, pile up a huge bunch of money on a new car, and let you deal with this vicious cycle a few years down the road, and not save a dime, which I know I haven't mentioned, but was really the reason why this whole thing was started.

So now I know what negative equity is, I know how much I have (read: too much), and I know I need to fix it.

However, to do that I'll need a little luck, some help from family, and then we have to actually choose a new vehicle.

What happens? What saved the day? Why is there not doom and gloom here? Well, I've written quite a bit so far, so I'll cut this one short. Let me work out some details on what I'm going to do next, and I'll post the latter half of this story.

Oh, and if you're still reading this, may I commend you. That's a lot of drivel I tell ya. Stop a geek from blogging for a few months, see what happens?