My Dumbest Purchase Ever
Today I would like to reflect on one of my most infamous purchases. This was a long time ago and has since drilled some nice principles into my spending habits and the way I spend money. I still make mistakes now and again but this was one of the first that really hit home that I needed to change my financial life style. There have been other milestones but this was by far the dumbest thing I have ever paid money for. I feel as though I am far enough past it in order to not only talk openly about it but to try and provide some insight to others who might inadvertently make the same mistake I did. Being that it is also for DebtKid’s (Dumbest Purchase) Contest, it seemed like an appropriate time to bring such a painful memory.
I was a sophomore in college and was receiving financial aid out the wazoo. I had the advantage of not having lucrative income from my parents and that caused my FAFSA to tell the government that I was in a bad way and needed as much as the tax payers could swing. Naturally this left me with a fair amount of “extra” disbursement to afford books, food and rent.
The day after I got a whopping check for $2,011.76 I felt that I needed to spend it as soon as possible. (Of course, if I had said this to myself now I would think differently, but I digress…) What does a young male in a college town need more than anything?? Why a vehicle of course! And not just any vehicle, but something cool.
My college town was surrounded by two things; farms and “mom-and-pop” used car lots. At first I thought that I would simply go with the run of the mill pick up truck like a good majority of my friends and then I saw it.
A silver 1985 Fleetwood Cadillac. Complete with velor bench seats, all electronic controls and enough trunk space to smuggle the population of Mexico, if only my politics would allow. That car was absolutely beautiful. I quickly asked if I could take it for a test spin. It was like driving a cloud. So quiet it was eerie. There were seemingly no bumps in the road and it had a nice old school feel that made it seem like I had been driving it for years. I got about 3 miles down the road and made a silky smooth U-turn with the thin steering wheel turning loosely like it knew what I was doing and drive it right back to the car lot.
“How much?” I asked as I got out. The car salesman said “Well I’d say about $2,000.” I knew that I was going to need a bit for the tax and title so I said, “I’ll write you a check right now if we can do $1,700.” “Yea I think we can do that.” This boat was mine!
I drove it for about 2 weeks and had no trouble justifying to myself that 3 miles per gallon was not a bad deal and the strange lights flashing on the dash board were a throw back from the paranoia of the Reagan Administration due to the Cold War. I saw past any scratch that seemed to slowly appear and couldn’t help but drive it even when completely unnecessary to do so.
November came and I needed to drive down to Raleigh to fly home for Thanksgiving. I was excited because I was going to cruise in the Fat Caddy, and listen to the old tapes I had no other use for. I can only look back on this time in my life and shake my head.
Upon returning back from visiting family, I began the 2 hour drive back to my apartment. About 20 minutes after being on the freeway, one of the mysterious lights on the dash board began to need more and more attention. Lights were beeping and lights were flashing like some sort of bad emergency situation on the space shuttle. What in the world could be the issue? Then the beeping stopped. Whew what a relief! This miraculous car had some how healed itself! Not even five minutes later a beeping ensued like I had never heard before. It was urgent, pained and very unhappy. Then that beeping stopped. Not because of some deity-like intervention.
The car had shut off.
So there I was cruising down the interstate slowly going from about 70 to zero with no power steering at about 8:30 at night in a state where I knew no one.
Luckily I still had a working battery and some genius had put a bulb under the hood so I could take a gander at what started all the ruckus. Billowing sweet smelling steam was filling the roadside and I thought perhaps that a hose had just come off. A little further inspection showed that a hose had split. I walked to a gas station about a mile away and bought some duct tape and bottle of cheap conditioner and went in to MacGyver mode. I emptied out the conditioner, wrapped it around the house after cutting it, and duct taped the day lights out of it and got back on the road.
The plastic on the bottle and duct tape quickly melted from the insanely high temperature and I repeated this process trying different things over and over. I got home about 8 hours later, at about 4 AM.
The car was still drivable to me. I couldn’t drive it for more than 10 minutes before it over heated and the mechanic said that it was going to cost more than $500 to fix. But it was a small town and as long as I didn’t go far, and no one complained about the incredible amount of smoke it was producing, I would be fine. The mechanics diagnosis was a cracked cylinder head from over heating and he said that it would eventually seize and ruin the block. What did he know? It still drive fine in short spurts!
A week later it “seized.”
So now I had a car that I couldn’t drive, couldn’t fix and had a hard time looking at due to the betrayal I felt. So I parked it in front of my apartment and left it there for the better part of a year. Eventually the registration tags ran out and the tires rotted and it became an even worse sinking ship. That’s not even the end of this story.
I woke one day and happened to look out and saw that the car was gone. I called the tow company and they said they had towed it due to “complaints and that it had obviously been deemed abandoned.” I could hardly blame them, it was in sorry shape and had seen fairer days, but honestly they could have just asked.
Of course I had no money to get it out car jail, and had just gotten a Jeep Cherokee that my mom handed down, so what did I do? I signed over my title to the car towing company. It was a $70 towing fee that I traded that Cadillac for. I spent just under $2,000 and then paid to have it given away.
Please keep your comments gentle as I still look upon other Caddys as something special, and this is a bit of a sore subject for me. It was also an incredibly valuable lesson. I drove that Jeep for over 10 years, across the country and back, twice, and had every maintenance check done to it that I could. I plan on driving my current vehicle for even longer. $
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Comments
Dude I don’t know if you know this or not, but this so called bad memory of yours looks a whole lot better than any of these new spaceship looking cars on the road nowadays. Old school is cool.
You do have a really good point. I think about that battleship just about every time I see a Caddy. The other day I swear I saw one that was almost exactly the same one. Almost chased it down. I think my only real regret was getting it too soon for my maturity/income to take care of it the way it should have been.
Thank goodness for your mom!! I recall the words of MY eldest son: “Everything is a life lesson with you!!” hmmmm