YOUR WORST INVESTMENT – A NEW CAR

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Posted on 16th April 2013 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

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Does it Ever Make Sense to Buy a New Car?

April 15, 2013

By   http://ericpetersautos.com/

I’ll probably get in trouble. After all, I write new car reviews. Advising people not to buy new cars is not what you’d probably expect. But, here’s the fulsome scurvy truth: I – and every car journalist I know – drive used. Because we know. And now, I’m gonna spill the beans, give you the Straight Dope – so that you’ll know, too. Here goes.

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* A new car is the absolute worst investment you’ll ever make.

That’s not an assertion or my opinion. It’s an incontestable fact. Proof? Show me an investment that is all-but-guaranteed to leave you with less money (a lot less money) than you started with and I will show you a bad investment. Car salesmen often talk about the investment you’re about to make. Well, I suppose for them it is.  But for you? Uh, no. The average new car loses 30-40 percent of its original MSRP value within five years of leaving the lot. How”s that for an investment?

The reality is a car is an appliance – not an investment. There will be no return. You’ll get to use (and hopefully, enjoy) it for a period of time. Nothing more. The best you can do is minimize your losses. Side-stepping new car depreciation – which takes the biggest bite during those first five years from new – is the single biggest (and smartest) way to do that.

* New cars cost you more in ways you may have forgotten to take into account.

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Probably the main reason most people buy a new car is because they like the idea of not having to worry (at least, financially) about repair costs for the first few years of ownership – while the vehicle is covered by the new car warranty. That’s absolutely valid, reasonable and understandable. However, you are paying handsomely for that (see the first bullet point above) and not only for that.

When you buy a new car, there will often be sales tax on the purchase. In my state (VA) it is 3.2 percent of the vehicle sales price. If you bought a $25,000 new car (that figure represents the average “transaction cost” of a new car as of 2012) you will be presented with a sales tax tab of around $800. But we’re just getting started. Next, you’ll probably find out that your insurance bill has increased. Because insurance costs are based in part on the projected replacement cost of the vehicle insured – and it will cost more to replace (or repair) a brand-new $25,000 car than it would to send you a check for the $6,500 “book value” of your current (not new) car if it gets totaled.

In the past, it have cost less ot cover a new car because of new car equipment such as ABS, stability control and so on – which were associated in the underwriter’s mind with reduced likelihood of a wreck (and thus, a claim). But all new cars have all this stuff now – so the discounts aren’t what they were. Meanwhile, new cars have more “stuff” – for example, six or more air bags vs. the formerly typical two. Replacement costs are enormous – and this is reflected in the cost of insurance.

Oh, and don’t forget: Some states (and localities) hit you with an annual personal  property tax on top of all this. It’s usually based on a vehicle’s average retail value. A new car valued by the state/county at $25,000 can mean paying hundreds in personal property taxes every year for the next few years – until the car’s value drops.

* New cars add stress to your life.

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My neighbor recently bought a brand-new (and $40,000-plus) truck. Last week, he accidentally backed it into a brick retaining wall. About $4,000 in damage to the bumper/tailgate and driver’s side rear quarter panel. He is beside himself. And he hasn’t gotten the letter yet from his insurance co. “adjusting” his rates. Contrariwise, about two years ago, my wife hit a deer – well, the deer hit her – while she was out driving our ’98 model truck. Next day, I used a strong rope and a big tree to pull the bumper back out and used my hand to pop the dents mostly out. It’s not perfect – but who cares? It’s an old truck. I am immune to sweating door dings. I don’t mind driving it in the woods, because I’m not worried about tree branches scuffing the paint. The paint is already scuffed. There are already stains on the seats. Another coffee spill isn’t going to hurt. The steering wheel plastic is cracking. But guess what? All this will happen to your new vehicle, too. Only you’ll be upset about it when it happens.

I’m not – because it already has.

* Today’s used cars are better than yesterday’s new cars.

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If you haven’t noticed, modern cars last – and last. And then last some more. It’s commonplace for a late-model car (that’s pretty much any car built since the mid-late 1990s) to go 10-15 years and more than 200,000 miles before it begins to become untrustworthy or a money pit. Over the past 20-something years, manufacturing tolerances have tightened up, processes and materials are much better and production has to a great extent been automated in order to eliminate or at least reduce the quality control issues that used to arise from one shift to the next (and so on). As a a result the build quality -and long-haul durability – of the average late-model car is night-and-day better than it used to be.

That, in turns, means if you buy a four or five-year-old used car with say 50,000 miles on it, you can reasonably expect it to give you no major problems for another 100,000-plus miles and ten years. Of course, it’s important to be careful – and check over any prospect very carefully. Or have it checked out by someone with the necessary know-how. But as a rule – meaning, unless you have the bad luck to land a lemon or choose a good car that had a bad owner who abused it – the odds are excellent that any late-model used car you buy will give you more life and more miles and less trouble than any brand-new car would have back in the ’70s and even into the ’80s.

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This is the secret the automakers hope you’ll never, ever learn. Because they need people to keep on buying new cars every six years or so – right around the time they finished paying off the note on the last one.

If you like debt, if you don’t mind losing 30-40 percent (or more) in depreciation on your “investment” – or if you’ve just got to have the latest thing or think that new car smell is worth it – and there’s nothing wrong with any of that – then by all means, go ahead. Sign right up.

But you won’t find me doing it. Or any other car journalist I know. And that ought to tell you something… .

Throw it in the Woods?

http://ericpetersautos.com/

HOW OBAMA WILL OUTLAW GUNS

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Posted on 28th November 2012 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

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Here’s How it Will be Done…

November 24, 2012

By Eric Peters

Incrementalism has proved depressingly effective as a tool for getting most people to quietly surrender their rights piecemeal. For gradually habituating them to an ever-diminishing circle of liberty. When the circle finally closes and their rights no longer exist at all, they hardly notice – because by that time, most of their rights have already been taken.

The final surrender is met with a shrug rather than a scream of outrage.

Think how Americans have been habituated to arbitrary search and seizure. Something like the TSA would simply not have been tolerated if it came out of the blue sky circa 1980. And no, the terrr attacks of nineleven did not “change everything.” Getting people to accept “sobriety checkpoints” beginning around 1980 changed everything. Accept that – and something like Gate Rape is inevitable.

The same process works just as well when it comes to dismantling due process – and removing limits on what the government may not do to us. We didn’t get to legal strip searches for jaywalking or littering in one fell swoop. Nor rendition, torture as policy – and presidential kill lists. It is a matter of getting them – getting us – to  tolerate “A” so that “B” will be accepted in turn.

This is how the citizens of the United States will be disarmed.

No sudden, mass ban or attempt at confiscation – because that would probably lead to open violence on a large scale and they – people like Dear Leader Obama and his Vyshinsky, AG Eric Holder, know this.

So, instead, they will first pass “reasonable” restrictions.

They will target not guns – just dangerous guns. So easy to demagogue anything with, say, a high-capacity magazine. Or which looks “military.” Think how the ground has already been ceded by mainstream “gun rights” groups like the NRA – which invariably talk about “sportsmen” and “hunting.” Who needs an AR-15 (or Sig 220) to hunt?

Open carry will be next. How many millions of Clovers would support a ban?

Next, they’ll lobby for a new law (or just issue a fatwa) that makes it much harder to get a CC permit. Such as at a judge’s discretion. And only if you have a “legitimate” purpose. Self-defense will not be considered a legitimate purpose.

But the big one – tied to Obamacare – will be the transformation of gun ownership into a public health issue.

The assault on smoking (and lately, soft drinks) should have alerted people – but as with “sobriety checkpoints,” most people readily supported the imposition of massive taxes on smokers because, after all, it is unhealthy to smoke. And of course, they didn’t smoke. So their rights were not on the table (foolish them). They – most people – never see that an attack on anyone’s rights is an attack on their rights.They are easily gulled by their moralistic fetishes – their disapproval of some concrete thing other people do which they don’t like. Not seeing that if the government can ban (or control or regulate) this than it certainly can ban, control or regulate that. The particulars don’t matter. The principle is everything.

Thus, smoking has been anathematized – and rendered exorbitantly expensive to partake of. Not an outright ban – not yet. But ever closer, every year.

And guns? It will be argued it is unhealthy to have a gun in the house. There will be talk of all the suicides and domestic violence (red herrings, these – but exceptionally effective tools of emotional manipulation).

Inevitably, the children will come into play.

It will be argued that anyone who possesses a gun must also possess insurance. Just as car owners are required to buy insurance; just as we are soon to be forced to buy health insurance. The same arguments will be used – because they’ve already been accepted. Thus, just as it is not illegal to have a car – so long as you buy insurance for it – it will not be illegal (yet) to own a gun. So long as you are “properly insured.”

That will be the first step.

The second step ought to be obvious. Legal gun ownership will rendered increasingly unaffordable.

As with collectivized car and health insurance, the insurance you will be forced to buy in order to keep a gun will be based on the costs imposed by the collective. It will not matter that you handle your gun safely. Because others have not, you will be made to pay.

People can afford to buy a $500 rifle or pistol. How many will be able to afford paying $500 a year to lawfully keep that rifle or pistol? How many will be able to afford keeping more than one rifle or pistol?

Can you see where this is headed? Is it not brilliant in its subtlety?

Insurance costs have already proved their effectiveness at limiting the number of vehicles the average person can afford to keep. I’ve written before about the effect mandatory insurance has had on hobbyists. It used to be easy (and legal) to keep a “parts car” or “project car” because other than the costs of buying it and fixing it up, there were no other costs. So long as you didn’t put it on the road, you didn’t have to insure it. In numerous areas around the country, you must now keep valid tags – and insurance – on every single vehicle, even those kept in a garage or in your back yard. If not, the vehicle is subject to confiscation.

Exactly the same tactics will be deployed against firearms. And it will be impossible to fight – because the fight over the principle was lost long ago. How will anyone argue against mandatory gun insurance when they have already accepted mandatory car insurance and now mandatory health insurance?

In a very short time, the government will have effectively disarmed most people without ever having had to push for an outright ban. The small handful of people who still possess arms will only be able to possess a few types and be very limited in what they can (legally) do with them.

Dealing with them will easy. Because there will be so few.

And because they will have already conceded the point anyhow.

Throw it in the Woods?

WE HAVE CROSSED THE RUBICON

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Posted on 16th December 2011 by Yojimbo in Economy

[By Eric Peters, from SHTFplan.com]

Do you suppose cows have any idea what’s coming as they’re marched down the chute? Or do they stare with bovine indifference at the tail and hind quarters in front of them, until they’re suddenly – and very briefly – startled by the man with the nail gun?
Perhaps Americans will – likewise too late – ask themselves What Happened in the very near future. Perhaps just after the midnight knock comes and they are taken away into the night.

It is not an exaggeration.

America is now on the cusp of becoming a state that does exactly such things; things exactly like the things done by 20th century horror shows such as NS Germany or Stalin’s USSR. Literally. Not “this is where it might lead” or “the tendency is similar.” Exactly, literally, the same thing. The only difference is that it awaits being done on a mass scale. But the power to do it openly – brazenly – has been asserted.

And is about to be sanctified by law.

The National Defense Authorization Act will make it official. It will confer upon the executive branch and the military (increasingly, the same things) the permanent authority to snatch and grab any person, U.S. citizens included, whom it decrees to be a “terrorist” – as defined or not by the executive or the military – and imprison them, indefinitely, without formal charge, presentation of evidence or judicial proceeding of any kind. These “detainees” will have neither civilian rights in the civil court system, nor – crucially – even the minimal rights to due process and decent treatment conferred upon prisoners of war. (And we are allegedly “at war,” are we not?)

The language of the bill specifically includes American citizens “caught” within the borders of the United States – aka, the “battlefield.” It is claimed by sponsors that only those awful them – you know, theenemies of freedom The Chimp and his successors like to reference as they systematically gut our freedoms – need worry. But read the actual document, and be afraid. The wording is such that any shyster lawyer for the government will be able to draw up a memorandum at some point in the near future equating, say, criticism of the federal government’s policies in the Middle East with “substantially supporting” the enemies of the United States. As defined by the United States.

That is, as defined by the government.
At its whim. At the personal discretion of whomever happens to be the Maximum Leader, or even one of the ML’s duly appointed minions.

As the always excellent Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone recently observed, what happens when some nutjob who attended a few Tea Party meetings tries to bomb a federal building? Will the Tea Party itself – and anyone who “substantially supports” it be thus transformed into an “enemy combatant”? How about the OWS protestors? How about this web site – and this author – which have on several occasions called bullshit on the federal government’s usurpations and follies? How hard will it be, really, to describe such actions – such thoughtsexpressed in an article or an interview – as “substantially supporting” whatever the government decides amounts to “terrorism” or the threat thereof against itself?

Surely, the door is now wide open for such an interpretation by some John Woo or Dick Cheney waiting in the wings. Prospective jefe Newtie is practically turgid at the prospect of getting his hands on such power. And there is no longer (or soon won’t be) any legal means available to contest a one-way trip to Treblinka in Topeka – or wherever it is they will send you.

Taibbi writes:

“The really galling thing is that this act specifically envisions American citizens falling under the authority of the bill. One of its supporters, the dependably-unlikeable Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, bragged that the law ‘basically says … for the first time that the homeland is part of the battlefield’ and that people can be jailed without trial, be they ‘American citizen or not.’ New Hampshire Republican Kelly Ayotte reiterated that ‘America is part of the battlefield.’ ”

Graham further stated:

“It is not unfair to make an American citizen account for the fact that they decided to help Al Qaeda to kill us all and hold them as long as it takes to find intelligence about what may be coming next. And when they say, ‘I want my lawyer,’ you tell them, ‘Shut up. You don’t get a lawyer.’ ”

The key thing being, it is entirely up to the government to decide what constitutes “helping” al Qaeda. It can be nothing more than a vague assertion. Indeed, no evidence of any kind whatsoever is necessary to “hold them as ling as it takes” in order to “find intelligence” (not defined, either) by any means it wishes to employ.

As Taibbi notes:

“If these laws are passed, we would be forced to rely upon the discretion of a demonstrably corrupt and consistently idiotic government to not use these awful powers to strike back at legitimate domestic unrest.”

The Fuhrer (oops, President Obama) is about to sign this latter-day Enabling act and when he does, it will mark the moment that America’s coffin is nailed shut. The corpse has been on view since 9/11. But there was always some hope that, perhaps, it might be jolted back into life. Now we know the awful truth. Death is permanent.

And it’s coming for us.