The dog is on the floor a few feet away chewing on a bone. Every time I look over, he wags his tail – he wants to play. We’ll be taking our first long-ish trip together when we head to Bucks County for the Thanksgiving weekend. I’ve never traveled with a dog before – let alone a high-energy, somewhat needy, and bulky breed like my guy. I bought a crate for him for in the hotel. He’s doing well with it and slept in it last night. I was told he was crate trained when I adopted him. I’ve been reading on how to travel with a dog and what to expect. Here, I can leave him for hours during the day with no problems, but being in a different environment could be an entirely different issue. If I thought he could get along with other dogs, I’d take him with me to visit people, but the socialization process has been slow – mostly because I’m barely socialized myself. The trip is making me a little nervous. I’m going to have to do a fair amount of driving back and forth between the hotel and whatever it is I’m doing – it’s a level of logistics with which I have no experience… I’m trying to view it as a test run – let’s see if we can do this. Maybe he can be the travel buddy I was hoping for when I adopted him.
What’s really making me nervous about the trip is my car. Not so much the dog in the car – he likes going for rides, but the actual car. Over the past few weeks, it has started to make more engine noise, and once or twice, it has bucked while shifting gears on the highway. I worked from home on Friday and took it into the shop to have it checked out and to get it inspected. They said I’d need a new windshield in order for it to pass inspection. That didn’t surprise me – I do a lot of highway miles to and from work and the trucks are often kicking up rocks. As for the noise and shifting issue, it had a leaky gasket and the spark plugs are getting gummed up. I’m not sure if that’s the technical term they used. Fixing the gasket and the coils and the plugs and cleaning everything up would cost $1,800. I’d have to get the windshield done somewhere else (I know that’s another $200 – $500). And then I can expect at least another $100 when I get it inspected (there’s always something minor). I thanked them for letting me know and said I’d need to sleep on it.
I wasn’t sure about putting between $2k and $3k into a car that has 178k miles on it and isn’t in the best condition. I did this last year and wasn’t sure about it then either. Back in 2018, I was hit by a drunk driver on a highway (hit and run). I fared ok, but it was a pretty high speed accident and the car got banged up. Both driver-side doors needed to be replaced as did the rear bumper. The seal on the driver’s side door has never been the same – in heavy rain, water will sometimes drip in. A month or so after getting it fixed, the bumper needed to be fixed a second time when driving on a highway in South Carolina it popped loose and began flapping in the wind (I pulled over and fixed it with zip ties so I could finish the 10 hour drive home). The CD player stopped working years ago – so did the aux jack. The heater/defogger dial doesn’t work and now only has one setting which is mostly heat, with very little defogging. This sucks in winter when ice starts to accumulate on the windshield.
It seems that every year, I’m faced with the possibility of needing to get a new car. And so far, every year, I make the decision to see if I can get one more year out of it. I can remember last year driving home from work one day thinking it’s time to get a new car when I pulled up next to an older and more beat up car. I said to myself – if that car can make through the winter, mine can too. This year, I’m not so sure. I brought the car home Friday afternoon and spent the better part of Saturday morning searching the inventory of new cars in the area. I tend to want to buy new and drive it until it dies. I prefer new because I don’t want to buy someone else’s problem and because the financing rates are always better (I hate paying interest). After some research and a lot of hemming and hawing, I took the car back over to the shop to get it fixed. One more year.
A modest new car (Civic, Elantra, Mazda 3) runs in the lower 20k range which means $2k – $3k out of pocket as a down payment and another $3k – $4k per year in payments. I’d still be driving it long miles, the windshield would still get chipped from the stupid trucks, and the dog would still shed all over the back seat. I have a beater and a bit of a beater lifestyle. It seemed like getting it fixed was the fiscally prudent thing to do. Besides, new car inventory is low and prices are high (about 9% higher than a year ago – used cars are almost 40% higher). It’s a shitty time to buy a car and I’m a little sick of being on the business end of crappy market conditions.
The only problem with this plan is that $1,800 later, the car is still making the noise. The mechanics think it’s the water pump starting to fail – they might be able to get to it another day this week (I’m looking at $250 – $400). In my head, I’m already chasing sunk costs – I put in the $1,800. And what if they can’t get to it this week? I’m imagining the car breaking down on the turnpike (this happened to me once before) and my dog biting the tow-truck driver as we head to a repair shop that is closed for the holiday weekend. These are the frustrations that make me dislike being an adult. I spent hours of my day on Saturday researching and trying to make an informed decision only to have the same problem that I had when I walked into the shop one day earlier. Even today, when I’ve wanted to spend my time reading and writing, I’ve been preoccupied with how I’m going to manage the dog and the hotel and seeing people and the stupid car.
This is also when I kinda hate being single. As part of a couple or family unit, you just have more options. You don’t have to figure everything out on your own. As I researched new cars, I pulled up my budget spreadsheet (yes – I’m that type of a dork). On it, I run a few different columns/scenarios: past costs (these were my expenses when I lived in Memphis), current costs (which I’m fortunate to be able to keep very low), and potential costs (if I were to buy a house or rent something and/or buy a car). For shits and giggles, I plugged in my Memphis costs (which were cheaper than when I owned a house and had a mortgage) and added in the cost of getting a new car. I then calculated what my take-home salary would need to be to afford that type of lifestyle. The math didn’t work in my favor. I ran a similar scenario with rental costs for central PA (nothing extravagant but also not the cheapest places) – in that scenario, I’d break even. The math pretty much dictates a long commute in a crappy car… mostly because I’m single and work in the nonprofit sector.
The whole thing got to be a bit of a downer. I know I’m more fortunate than most people. And if deciding between buying a new car or fixing the old one has proven stressful and frustrating for me, I can only imagine how it feels to people with much tighter budgets than mine: single parents with difficult hours and worse pay. This is one of the reasons I do the work I do. This is why I bristle when the current “labor shortage” is framed in the context of work ethic. Right now, people are quitting their jobs in record numbers. They’ve discovered that there are more important things than work – especially, if at the end of the day they might be further back than where they started. They want to do more than just get by. They want, I suspect, life to be a little easier, a little more fair with fewer setbacks.
I understand some of their frustration. I’m frustrated that something as essential as transportation has already taken up this much of my time and energy… that a simple trip home has so many small complications. I’ll need to get the car back in the shop before I leave for the holiday (or the worry will get the best of me). The dog, unaware of any of this, is sleeping in his crate, snoring and probably drooling.