[QUOTE=Unintentionally Blank]
Believe me, our income has been seriously curtailed since having kids. That’s my concern. It’s not that losing the Corvette would ‘suck’. It’s that losing the Corvettes means it’ll be, perhaps, a decade, before I can go through the pain to get a replacement.
I spent a five year period with $850 a month payments, for a car I could use 8 months a year. I do not want to do it again. buying a corvette is not an experience I want to relive.
And to clarify a minor point: We can hold our breath for nearly two years on our liquid assets, and not selling assets or touching equity or retirement with one income. Luckily, I work for state government, I doubt I’d be fired, but still.
[/QUOTE]
Man, you’ve just got to let the car thing go. Here’s reality: You have a FAMILY now. You have priorities. When we were single, we had an airplane. I loved it. Planned to be an airplane owner all my life. I saw it as a liberating symbol of my freedom to go places and get above it all, in a literal and metaphorical sense. Well guess what? Reality intruded. It became clear that an airplane just wasn’t going to fit into our life plan for a long time. So it went away. Along with all the stress associated with maintenance, parking and insurance fees, etc.
If you can own two vettes without putting any stress on yourself or your family, great. Go for it. But when you find yourself on anti-depressants and writing rants that include your vehicles as major stressors in your life, you need to take a step back and start re-evaluating.
My guess is that the real issue here is that you can’t make the conceptual leap from being a cool single guy with sports cars to being a family man with children. Hey, we all go through it. But that’s life. Other than your father dying, EVERYTHING else you’ve ranted about is really just life as it happens.
Let me count up the problems: You had twins. You have an aging grandfather in a retirement home. It turns out that high-paying IT jobs are also unstable. Your sports car has a mechanical problem. Your kids occasionally get sick, and have some issues you’re going to have to parent them through. Guess what? There’s nothing extraordinary or unusual about ANY of this. It’s not rotten luck. The universe isn’t out to get you. You are leading a normal, if somewhat privileged life, which comes with challenges and opportunities. Deal with it.
My guess is that the real problem is that you are depressed. Sometimes depression is situational, but other times the depression makes ordinary situations seem like the worst things that could ever happen. You’re taking various anti-depressant medications, so my guess is that in your own head you’ve translated a bunch of what are really very minor problems and turned them into oh-my-god-the-world-is-collapsing-around-me.
And some obvious financial advice: A person with the comfortable financial situation you appear to be in has NO excuse for carrying debt on credit cards. You’re pissing money away for nothing. Stop doing that. If I were you, I’d dump the least-favorite Vette, use the money to pay off your cards, and then vow to never again carry a balance from one month to the next. You can obviously afford to do that.
Another thing you might consider: Even if she hasn’t said so, if your wife is stressed, part of the reason is that she’s seething inside that you are having financial problems while you’re sitting on tens of thousands of dollars of sports cars that are doing her and you no good. Don’t let that become resentment, or it will do damage to your relationship. You need to have a talk with her and see if that’s bothering her at all. If it is, you really, really need to consider selling that stuff. Or at least making a compromise of selling one of them.
BTW, your argument that you’re keeping useless cars around because they are paid off and you don’t want to go through the pain of buying another new one makes NO sense. None whatsoever. Those cars aren’t new NOW. You could sell them today, put the money in the bank, and then in ten years buy the same year of vette back again at a much lower price. And in the meantime your money will have gone up by 50% or more, instead of depreciating by 70-80%, which is what it’s doing now.
Unless the cars are collectible, appreciating assets, you are losing thousands of dollars every year by hanging on to them. It’s a stupid financial decision, so don’t couch it in financial terms. If they mean a lot to you and you can’t bear to part with them, fine. But don’t fool yourself into believing you are doing something smart. That’s just the justification you’ve invented in your head for your unwillingness to let them go.
)