About a month ago, my wife and I bought a used 2014 Nissan Leaf for $4200. Paid cash, of course. When we told my MIL we were thinking about the purchase, she was very confused and more than a little concerned. She's the personality type that is baffled when other people make choices she wouldn't. Literally -- if you disagree with her, it's not because you have different values or goals, it's because you're "confused" or "don't understand" what she's trying to tell you.
A couple hours after telling her that we'd decided to buy the car -- she called my wife (her daughter) and tried to talk her out of it (she's realized there's no "reasoning" with me, and vice versa). My wife put her on speaker. It was the usual chorus of car-clown-filled complaints and excusitis disguised as questions.
Q: "Is it true it will
only go 100 miles?"
A: Yes, but we drive less than 10 miles a day. And OP is working from home permanently now.
Q: "What if you both need to go somewhere?"
A: We're keeping our old, gas car for road trips. If both of us need to be somewhere unbikeable at the same time, one of us can just take that.
Q: "Well, what if you both need to go out of town?"
A: At the same time, more than 100 miles away, in
different directions?
This has literally never happened in the six years we've been together.Eventually, the discussion turned to money. We'd sent her the online listing for the car, and she'd seen that it was only $4000. That's
far less than she's ever spent on a vehicle. But not to worry, she had the solution -- financing (cue magic sounds). Her position paraphrased: If you finance a car, you'll be able to buy something newer and nicer, and you won't have to put $4000 down, so you won't have to worry about not having those funds available.
Direct quote (from a follow up text message she sent after our call): "Yes, you pay some interest, but you won't notice the financial impact as time goes by vs just not having those funds available any longer."
My MIL's concern for us no longer having that $4000 in the bank had my wife and I stumped. It was literally like a month's worth of savings. If we, for some reason, needed an extra 4k in cash within the next couple weeks, we could just float it on a credit card and pay for it with next month's surplus without interest. But, talking about MIL's logic later that night, we realized why she was so worried. She thought we were poor, that that $4000 was literally all we had to our names.
I can see why she would think that. We bought a fixer upper house earlier this year and have been doing all the work ourselves. We buy almost everything second hand, and (before the leaf) our only car was a 2003 Acura my wife bought in high school. My MIL was thinking we'd been doing all that out of necessity. She knew my wife had a medical emergency last year that set us back close to $7k. She probably assumed we'd had to put that on a credit card. And maybe she also assumed I have a lot of student debt or that we make way less than we actually do.
The next day, she called me in a last ditch effort, literally as I was driving to meet the Leaf's seller with the check. She insisted that we should call it off and buy a newer car on credit, because we'd have to put less money down. And we'd appreciate still having that $4000 in the bank in case there was an "emergency".
At this point, I was more than a bit amused, but also getting frustrated by the stupidity of her argument and her "holier-than-thou", "I'm-so-sorry-you-can't-provide-for-our-daughter-like-we-did" attitude.
So I told her:
- We put over half of our income into savings and investments each month
- We're able to do that because we keep our monthly expenses low
- We keep our expenses low by avoiding monthly loan payments
I half-ranted, half-explained that many of our friends, who had leveraged their incomes to buy bigger, newer cars and homes (the exact same decisions she had lobbied we make ourselves), had had the worst, most stressful year of their lives. They'd spent the last 8 months worrying about how they would pay their bills after being furloughed or fired due to COVID. One of our friends literally bought one of those plastic, portable car shelters to park in at night because he was behind on payments and worried his car would be repo'd if it was visible from he street (his is a story for another post).
But through all of 2020, even as my company cut 80% of our staff to 3 days a week and 60% pay, my wife and I have been able to sleep like babies, because we have enough money in Betterment to live for
years without earning another dime.
That peace of mind, I told my MIL, was well worth driving a cheaper car bought in cash.
"Looks like you guys are in good shape," she said, and then politely hung up.
