Cars – in the end they all do the same thing - get you from A to B

The car that you drive says something about who you are.

We use material things to project an image of ourselves out into the world. If we want to portray a successful image we might buy a nice big shiny car. These type of cars generally cost us a lot of money but hey what the heck we’re successful aren’t we? We can take the finance offer and pay the car back in nice manageable monthly instalments.

So what does your car say about you?

What image are you trying to portray?

Who are you trying to impress?

Unfortunately sometimes we can get this wrong. My advice?

Tone down your Life

Or more specifically tone down your car.

Before we go on I want to make clear that I’m not trying to beat up on anyone here. I’m not trying to belittle hopes, dreams or aspirations of any readers. What I am trying to do is to help you build a sound financial foundation upon which you can achieve them.

Why burden yourself with stuff that you don’t necessarily need? I mean a car is a car is a car. The ultimate use of any car is to get you from A to B. Ok I understand that there is a whole image thing tied up with the car but are you that self conscious and lacking in self confidence that you feel the need to compensate for it by driving a big pointless car?

To me the coolest person on the block is the person who can jump into a beat up car and have the confidence to drive it around all the while not caring about what people think about them.

Easy to do?

No way!

I’m as self conscious as the next person and while my car might be six years old I make sure that it is always looking nice and polished. I made the mistake in the past of thinking that a car could somehow improve my social standing.

When I first started working I made the mistake of buying a nice new car. Girls love guys with nice cars right? Well to be honest I couldn’t really afford the car and as a result I never felt 100% comfortable driving it. Since I didn’t feel comfortable driving the car it always seemed that I was driving someone else’s car. Which is true - I was driving someone else’s car. I was driving the finance company’s car. Not a nice feeling.

The problem I had was that I hated not having any money at the end of the month more than I liked the car. Sure it was a really nice car but it was also a car that I couldn’t afford.

I had the car for eighteen months before I decided to get rid of it. I lost money on the transaction but I wasn’t too worried as I simply wanted out of the expensive repayments. I paid off the loan and I bought a much smaller and cheaper car. Not the coolest car by a long shot but cheap to run and it got me from A to B.

Sure I got some jokes in my direction about downsizing but to be honest they didn’t hurt half as much as the monthly repayments were hurting.

Mind over matter

If you don’t mind it don’t matter. So if you are comfortable with the car that you are driving then it shouldn’t matter what other people say. No I know it’s not easy. I struggled with the thought of changing my nice car for a less nice car for a long time. But I got there in the end. I resigned myself to the fact that if I ever wanted to have some sort of financial future that didn’t involved a debt overload then I needed to start cutting. My car was the biggest and most obvious choice to start with.

How about you?

Could you downsize your car? Could you put up with the jokes from so called friends and colleagues? Better still could you get rid of your car completely?

For more of my musings on Debt management and Personal Finance please subscribe to my RSS feed. Alternatively if you would like a free copy of my Debt management ebook “Understanding and getting out of debt” please sign up for my free newsletter.

No related posts.