My $7,000 Day

In our slightly early retirement my wife and I both play on a couple of tennis teams and most of our matches are about 100 miles from home.  What can I say, it is a rural flyover state and there just aren’t enough tennis players to have competition unless you gather the whole state in one place.  At least sometimes our matches are in the same city at the same time so we can go in one car.  That was the case two Saturday’s ago when I was through with my men’s doubles match and running errands while she was still playing.

I was driving along the interstate at 75 mph when suddenly my ten year old Infiniti sports coupe’s engine blew up.  Well that wasn’t the technical term for it but smoke and steam started coming into the passenger compartment through the air vents so it is close enough.  AAA came and got me and towed my little speedster to the dealer, twenty miles away.

 

Due to the age and the pretty high mileage on my car the blue book value was only about $7,500 so I was pretty sure it would not be worth fixing.  The high performance engine alone would cost close to $6,000 to replace and nobody in their right mind is putting that much in repairs into a $7,500 car.

 

So, what to do?  Even though we are fairly frugal with the cars we buy, the Infiniti was a splurge.  Not because it was expensive, because it was not at all, but because it was a third car for two people.  You could easily make a case that two retired people could share one car so having three is, by most counts, a little excessive.

 

And it is, but the sports car is crazy fun to drive and we can afford it with no problem so it is a luxury we (OK I) chose to buy.   In our defense, all three cars have well over 100k on the odometers and only one of them is worth over $10,000, and that’s maybe barely over.  Our hobbies have us needing larger vehicles with more cargo capacity often so neither of us was willing to have a small coupe as our main car but both of us like having it as a fun ride on solo trips with limited baggage.

 

So we had a decision to make, go back to two cars or look for a replacement for our little rocket sled.  The model we had is pretty rare with less than 4,000 of them produced.  It wasn’t limited edition, it just was not a very popular car and was dropped from production after a few years due to lack of demand.

 

We came up with a plan, to see if the dealer would give us a trade in on the dead smoker for something similar on his lot.  Oddly, he had a virtually identical car with similar mileage and age for $7,000.  The only other used car he had that was in the same category was much newer and lower mileage and cost $22,000.

 

I weighed the relative merits of a nearly new slower sports sedan that cornered poorly with what I knew to be a fun little beast and wrote him a check for the $7,000 replacement Infiniti, exactly the same car I had before mine melted down.  They towed my sad old car to an auction where it will be sold  for parts that I might get $700 for, or about $500 net after paying the tow and the auction fee.  (Update, I netted $850!)  Any lessons in this?  A few I think.

 

One, if you drive old cars you need to expect to have a few issues and on rare occasions a catastrophic failure is possible.  I fully expected 200,000 miles out of that car but got less than 150,000 miles.  It happens, and that’s a great thing about being financially independent.  We had $20,000 in checking and just wrote the $7,000 check  for the replacement car and it made exactly zero difference in our financial state.  We didn’t have to move any money from any retirement accounts because we always keep enough money on hand to handle emergencies, or in this case an inconvenience.

 

Two, even though old cars come with a reliability risk they can still be very nice.  Our new/old Infiniti for $7,000 has a huge horsepower to weight ratio so it goes way fast and can pass another car on our Arkansas two lane roads with only a very small amount of space needed. It sticks to the road like glue with awesome handling characteristics.    It has independent climate control on both sides, heated leather seats, all wheel drive, Bose sound with a subwoofer, massive disk brakes, memory on  seat, mirror and steering wheel position for two drivers, and because it is such a weird looking car of such a small production run nobody has any idea that it is not new when they see it.  People seem to think I’m driving a $50,000 late model sports car instead of a $7,000 near antique.  One friend of mine who drives a $68,000 pick up truck thought it was a 2018 model!

 

Three, although having three cars is a ridiculous splurge I’m doing it for a lot less money than many guys around here spend on one pickup truck or large SUV.  No matter how much money you accumulate if you love bargains it is hard to spend a fortune on a brand new car when driving an older car in good shape is just as much fun.

 

The truth is my wife and I could buy brand new Mercedes or Porsches with cash and never risk running out of money, but that seems incredibly wasteful and the driving experience would be about the same.  And if this car goes “Three Mile Island” like the last one and I have to write it off I’m really not out that much money.  Plus it  makes having that AAA auto club premium membership a paying proposition!  Those tow truck drivers are on a first name basis with me now, shout out to Cowboy!

 

This last week I had a blowout on the new/old Infiniti.  And lest you chalk that up to my driving old cars with lots of miles on them that had nothing to do with the flat tire.  The car had four brand new tires but I hit a piece of metal on the highway that I did not see and shredded one of the new tires.  It was kind of ironic that the only  equipment on that car that was brand new were the tires and that’s what failed!

 

How about it, has anyone else found a way to satisfy their “need for speed” with low cost performance vehicles?

 

Are you comfortable with the reliability of cars approaching 200k miles?

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