Retailers not doing so well

[brimic]

I drive a 15 year old truck. It's got 223k on it. That bitch is going to 400k if not more. Parts are still cheaper than a monthly payment.

I get you.
Spending $150-200/mo* on parts and several hours a month wrenching on it got to be a little too much.

*I have been spending at this rate on this car since at least october. Currently, it would need about $800 in parts just to make it nominally safe  and reliable to drive. Not worth it for a car with 240K on the clock.

[mtnbkr]

I drive a 15 year old truck. It's got 223k on it. That bitch is going to 400k if not more. Parts are still cheaper than a monthly payment.

Time isn't.  I bought a new car last year because it would save me $100/month on gas and I didn't have to spend time fixing things. 

Chris

[charby]

I get you.
Spending $150-200/mo* on parts and several hours a month wrenching on it got to be a little too much.

*I have been spending at this rate on this car since at least october. Currently, it would need about $800 in parts just to make it nominally safe  and reliable to drive. Not worth it for a car with 240K on the clock.

Time is hard/expensive for me, hard to have a vehicle out of service. I'm lucky I can take a bus to work, but hard do any other business without wheels.

I do my own wrenching, but when it becomes a time sync then vehicle goes and I get a newer one.

[Monkeyleg]

I have my Mustang, but my rainy day/parking lot car is a 24 year-old Saturn. I bought it new, and got my father's 15% GM discount.

The air conditioning stopped working over ten years ago. The power sunroof stopped working probably 15 years ago. The radio works, but I have to turn up the volume to hear over the static. The odometer stopped working maybe five years ago. My wife ruined the interior hauling plants when she worked for greenhouses. The headliner just gave up and disintegrated a few months back, so I had to rip the rest of it off.

All of the things needed to make it stop and go work properly, as do the parts required to make it legal to drive on public roads. I spend a couple of hundred a year on repairs, usually for routine stuff like brakes.

It's not pretty, but I'm not trying to impress anyone. I've always had beaters, with a nice sports or muscle car in the garage. There's other advantages to beaters, too. Other drivers give you a wide berth. It's almost as though they think whatever the beater has is contagious.

[brimic]

Time is hard/expensive for me, hard to have a vehicle out of service. I'm lucky I can take a bus to work, but hard do any other business without wheels.

I do my own wrenching, but when it becomes a time sync then vehicle goes and I get a newer one.

Yep- when the starter goes out when its -25 outside, wrenching isn't so much fun anymore. Bonus if I absolutely need the car the next day, extra bonus when I miss time doing something with the kids because saturday is another 'fix the car' day.

[KD5NRH]

I drive a 15 year old truck. It's got 223k on it. That bitch is going to 400k if not more. Parts are still cheaper than a monthly payment.

If you do have to buy something else, find something you can manage without trading it in.  Having a spare car is a great thing, and eliminates the disincentive of giving up wheels for a few days when you decide to do something like a full engine rebuild.

Routinely spend around $200/mo on parts, and you should be able to pretty much overhaul it in a year or two, then go another 500k miles.

[brimic]

If you do have to buy something else, find something you can manage without trading it in.  Having a spare car is a great thing, and eliminates the disincentive of giving up wheels for a few days when you decide to do something like a full engine rebuild.

Routinely spend around $200/mo on parts, and you should be able to pretty much overhaul it in a year or two, then go another 500k miles.

I have a '98 pontiac for sale, if anyone wants some 'spare wheels.' 

[KD5NRH]

I have a '98 pontiac for sale, if anyone wants some 'spare wheels.'

I'd bet parking it for 6mo or so while spending <$300/mo on parts would get it back pretty close to "looks bad, runs great" status and eliminate having to play catch-up with surprise repairs every month.  The other problem with only having one vehicle is not being able to park it when a problem appears until that one can be fixed, thus avoiding the chain reaction of failures.

[Balog]

Looks like the whole economy is not doing well.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-economy-contracted-1-in-first-quarter-2014-05-29?link=MW_latest_news

Gross domestic product, the sum of all goods and services produced by the economy, shrank by annual pace of 1% in the first three months of 2014, the Commerce Department said Thursday. Initially the government had reported last month that GDP rose at a seasonally adjusted 0.1% rate.

This tells you all you need to know about .gov reported statistics. "A historic drop in GDP? Sht, we can't say that. Let's just call it a slight rise and hope no one notices when we release the correction."

[Balog]

CNN's headline on this story (on the "news" not the opinion page mind you) was Economy shrinks, but it's not a big deal.

 

[Boomhauer]

If you do have to buy something else, find something you can manage without trading it in.  Having a spare car is a great thing, and eliminates the disincentive of giving up wheels for a few days when you decide to do something like a full engine rebuild.

Routinely spend around $200/mo on parts, and you should be able to pretty much overhaul it in a year or two, then go another 500k miles.

I'm not trading in.

I spend around $300-500 a year on parts. Work on it maybe every 3-4 months.

I have a '98 pontiac for sale, if anyone wants some 'spare wheels.'  Tongue

Pontiac is a tool of the devil. GM's cursed line, which is why I never lamented their demise. Come to think of it, GM doesn't really do well with cars. Trucks and vans built on real frames with RWD is their forte.

[RocketMan]

CNN's headline on this story (on the "news" not the opinion page mind you) was Economy shrinks, but it's not a big deal.

 

It would seem the Great Recession has itself gone into recession.  Does that make it a Depression yet?

[Balog]

It would seem the Great Recession has itself gone into recession.  Does that make it a Depression yet?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004OR1NS8/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B004OR1NS8&linkCode=as2&tag=revdnetw-20&linkId=EZ3RGALNQDJ2ZJKP

$2 on Kindle, and supporting the author makes lib-progs cry.

In this sophisticated yet readable book, Vox Day - one of the few economics writers to predict the current worldwide financial crisis - explains why it is likely to continue.Day shows that the policies being pursued in Europe, Asia, and the United States are very similar to Japan's failed policies of the past 20 years and, therefore, doomed to similar results. According to Day, the economic theories behind those policies are flawed and account for why most economists were unable to anticipate the recession or see that their expectations of an imminent recovery are incorrect. Day applies a different theory, the one he used to predict the current crisis, to show that the world is in the early stages of a massive economic contraction. Then he turns to the six scenarios presently envisioned by the world's leading economists and assesses which is most likely to unfold. As the title suggests, Day concludes that the most probable scenario is a Great Depression 2.0 that will be larger in scale and scope than that of the 1930s.

[brimic]

I'm not trading in.

I spend around $300-500 a year on parts. Work on it maybe every 3-4 months.

Pontiac is a tool of the devil. GM's cursed line, which is why I never lamented their demise. Come to think of it, GM doesn't really do well with cars. Trucks and vans built on real frames with RWD is their forte.

Pontiac was just a Oldsmobile/buick/chevy with different body moldings and interiors in GM's waning years- zero difference otherwise.

[Boomhauer]

Pontiac was just a Oldsmobile/buick/chevy with different body moldings and interiors in GM's waning years- zero difference otherwise.

Physically yes but there's just something about that marque...

[charby]

If you do have to buy something else, find something you can manage without trading it in.  Having a spare car is a great thing, and eliminates the disincentive of giving up wheels for a few days when you decide to do something like a full engine rebuild.

Routinely spend around $200/mo on parts, and you should be able to pretty much overhaul it in a year or two, then go another 500k miles.

I used to have 2 vehicles before I got married, a car for a daily driver and a pickup for my boat/hunting.

It gets expensive maintaining two vehicles with insurance and registration.

[RevDisk]

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004OR1NS8/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B004OR1NS8&linkCode=as2&tag=revdnetw-20&linkId=EZ3RGALNQDJ2ZJKP

$2 on Kindle, and supporting the author makes lib-progs cry.

Good book, but Vox Day is just as evil as any lib-prog. I see no difference between the two, just the freedoms they both want destroyed differ. Both are reminders of the importance of the Second Amendment. To ensure folks like that don't get the last word, and the ability to tell petty tyrants to sod off.



I'm not finished yet, but it's obviously favorable to Austrian school economics. Or hostile to Keynesian philosophy. I'm actually not a hater of Keynesian economics in theory, just in practice.

Two fold reason why. Keynesian economics says be frugal during the good times and spend like a drunken sailor during the bad times to smooth out the boom and bust cycle. People love it, because it gives them an excuse to spend like a drunken sailor, and they ignore the first part.

Second part, it's view of the boom and bust cycle is incomplete and it uses bad metrics. Plus it's hate on reasonable and sensible savings, while glorifying debt, is insane to the point of lunacy. How it handles debt/credit is flat out dangerous.

The recent bailouts, and I include Reagan as well as Obama, create a moral hazard by teaching bankers to engage in risky behavior at public expense. They privatize gains, and socialize losses. It basically trains our financial sector to make bad economic decisions.

And yes, the stimulus bailout was an even worse than usual bailout because it caused no growth in the private sector and growth in the public sector, likely encouraging deficit spending.

That's the beautiful part of Keynesian economics. Both sides love it. It glorifies wasteful spending, of either kickbacks to corporations or social program spending.

[Balog]

I honestly don't know much about Vox aside from the fact that he upsets people I don't like. What are his views that you consider evil?

[brimic]

That's the beautiful part of Keynesian economics. Both sides love it. It glorifies wasteful spending, of either kickbacks to corporations or social program spending.

+1

[RevDisk]

I honestly don't know much about Vox aside from the fact that he upsets people I don't like. What are his views that you consider evil?

http://voxday.blogspot.com/search/label/women

Scroll for a bit. Dude's fundamentalist Christian, which is fine, I know plenty of them that are decent human beings. Jocasse, for example. He's the not fine variety, and fixated on wimmin instead of gays or war on christmas. And he self-identifies as libertarian, somehow. I'm vaguely confused how a libertarian advocates using the state to deny rights to folks based on gender, as well social engineering.

My favorite was "oh noes, wimmin will ruin Defcon!!!" I haven't shown it to my lady friend, who enjoyed Defcon very much. I'll be sure to let her know her chromosomes will contaminate the conference, and send it spiraling out of control. Dude lays it on pretty thick, there's no need or reason to cherry pick for comments. But from what I read women destroy freedom, liberty, hacker conventions, fiscal responsibility, immigration, programming, university, military, and plenty else. It's interesting in its length.  Be sure to click "Older Posts", it's several dozen articles.

[Balog]

[KD5NRH]

It gets expensive maintaining two vehicles with insurance and registration.

Not sure about anywhere else, but TX is $54/year/vehicle.  Not really a killer.  Stacking insurance (two cars plus renter's, plus anything else your insurer has that you might benefit from) gets a pretty decent discount there too.

[RoadKingLarry]

Looks like the whole economy is not doing well.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-economy-contracted-1-in-first-quarter-2014-05-29?link=MW_latest_news

This tells you all you need to know about .gov reported statistics. "A historic drop in GDP? Sht, we can't say that. Let's just call it a slight rise and hope no one notices when we release the correction."

Didn't they used to call it a recession when the economy contracted?

[TommyGunn]

Didn't they used to call it a recession when the economy contracted?

Takes three quarters in a row to be a recession.

[charby]

Not sure about anywhere else, but TX is $54/year/vehicle.  Not really a killer.  Stacking insurance (two cars plus renter's, plus anything else your insurer has that you might benefit from) gets a pretty decent discount there too.

Not where I live. I pay $75 a year for my  2012 Nissan truck and 29.50 my boat trailer. Eventually my truck will go to $45

Wife pays $270 for her 2012 Honda Accord and 29.50 for the camper.

I think we play about $150 a month for full coverage insurance for both vehicles.