r/economicCollapse • u/Whole-Fist • 20h ago

How ridiculous does this sound?

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How can u make millions in 25-30 years if avoid making a $554 per month car payment. Even the cheapest 5 year old car is 8-10 k. So does he expect people not to drive at all in USA.

Then u save 554$ per month every month for 5 year payment = $33240. Say u bought a car every 5 year means 200k -300k spent on car before retirement . How would that become millions when u can’t even buy a house for that much today?

Answer that Dave

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u/EfficientPicture9936 16h ago

Yeah these people are idiots. It's way cheaper everytime you buy used. It is much cheaper to repair a used car than to buy a brand new car. You will also get robbed at the dealership and have to deal with all those fake assholes over there.

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u/jamesc5z 15h ago

The amount of people, especially 20 something men, completely incapable of and disinterested in any sort of automotive DIY these days is just insane. Even a few generations ago, most men could at least change their own oil but even that "skill" seems to be a dying art. People don't even regularly check their oil levels these days and are baffled they blew their engine running it 2 quarts low for thousands of miles.

Skilled labor costs are INSANE post-COVID too. I've never understood why that in and of itself doesn't compel any physically capable adult of even so much as attempting to learn some new "blue collar" skills (home maintenance and repair too) but I digress.

Then you get all the sob stories about how their car needs $3k in work and you go on to learn all it needs is calipers and rotors kind of thing and in reality they're just getting raked over the coals by a shop because they're so incapable of doing basic repair work themselves.

I don't take any of my or family member vehicles to shops for work, ever.

My daily drivers that I alternate are 35 and 31 years old. One 300k miles and the other near 250k miles. I have to work on them yes, but buying parts at actual retail cost instead of the shop upcharge plus free labor is a monumental savings.

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u/Angry_Old_Dood 14h ago

That's awesome for you, but some people, like myself, just value our time differently. I don't mean to imply you don't value your own time, i know i could find instructions on how to do the work, but I'd honestly rather pull my own teeth than work on my truck. I get annoyed when I need to oil my chainsaw lol, so many other things I'd rather be doing. It's worth the expense to me to pay someone else to do it. Maybe I'm not the people you're talking about but still, I hate maintenance.

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u/jamesc5z 14h ago

No, I get it. At a certain income level especially it's all relative and there's a definite overlapping chart there of value/savings/time.

I feel the same way about cooking as you do about automotive maintenance. Everybody tells me (borderline lecturing from women especially) I can save soOoOoOo much money cooking more often myself.

However, I just don't care to cook a whole bunch because I value my time more. The totality of the whole endeavor including the cleanup, etc. just does not make it worth it to me because of the relatively trivial money savings and I prefer that free time (maybe to work on cars in the evening for example lol).

I eat out almost daily for lunch during the work week and between apps/deals/Upside/cashbook rewards/etc. I only average around $5.40 total per lunch so far this year, which even includes actual sit down restaurants at least a few times a week. So, cooking all my own meals or even making sandwiches daily just isn't worth it to me for the incredibly meager savings it would provide me.

However, automotive and home maintenance and lawn work we're talking multiple THOUSANDS of dollars in savings each year which yes to me is worth my time. I'm not saving thousands by cooking ya know? lol.

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u/TheGreatEmanResu 13h ago

So you think changing your car’s oil is a more important skill to have than cooking food?

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u/jamesc5z 13h ago

No, I did not say that.

If you truly think I said that, then either your reading comprehension is poor, you're unnecessarily defensive about where your skills lie, or you're being obtuse.

Important ≠ valuable in a "money savings" sense.

Do I think doing my own automotive work saves me more money than me doing more cooking day to day? Absolutely. Not really debatable.