What’s Your Sport Age?
Home-ownership typically includes the benefit/curse of garage-ownership. I’ve seen some magically clean and organized garages, including a few of my own, but they typically don’t stay that way too long. Garage sprawl seems to grow and shrink in proportion to house junk like an accounting balance sheet.
Regardless of the nature of the junk... new junk, old junk, junk that you hope to use some day, junk needing repair, junk with missing instructions, or penguin-themed junk, the garage seems to offer the best place to store/shove said junk while considering next steps. Then, at some point during the decade, you discover the sorting pile has grown into its own junk community, and you suddenly don’t feel so welcome.
In fact, the junk seems to mock me, as a dusty, spider-infested reminder of my inability to confront my past. I know I should prioritize which junk holds value, and which junk I should toss, but it requires digging deep into my soul and asking painful, difficult questions, such as “does this bent shovel bring me joy?”
Eventually, the day comes when you decide you really need a place to put your car, because you live on a busy street, where a loose rock has gone airborne and plowed into your car door. As a result, you have an annoying dent that you would not have noticed the previous day, because yesterday, you had a 10-year-old Prius C with a missing hubcap, a rusty gouge on the back half, and a patched-up tail light.
Today, however, that dent sure sticks out on your brand new 2023 Kia Sportage Hybrid. Ten hours after signing the papers.
Yes, I bought a new car. With a completely made-up name that combines two topics of conversation I would rather avoid: sport and age. But, on the plus side, it’s a hybrid! You may wonder, how can I afford it? I certainly wonder.
I do know that my 10-year-old car with 100,000 miles carried a really large battery with a question mark for an end date. I also noticed that despite all the car had going against it, the Kelly Blue Book suggested I should get $6500-$7500 as a trade-in. Really? Okay, let’s see.
If I’m going to spend thousands of dollars on a new battery, I might as well get one that comes attached to a new car. So, I figured I would start researching, schedule a test driving, and then sit down and carve out a workable budget.
I began the planning process... but I did not complete the planning process. In fact, I jumped straight ahead to execution in an accelerated manner. I did check out that magic wizard of advice known as Consumer Reports. Then, at the test drive, they offered me $7000 for my junky trade-in, just like was foretold in the Book of Kelly Blue!
At that point, I kind of blacked out, and when I regained consciousness, I was driving home in my brand new vehicle, singing like Freddie Mercury reincarnated as a hyena. I looked around at the spoils of my impulse buy, and I started to think about the bucket we call a budget. Huh. I sure wondered where my new monthly payment would fit in that bucket.
Budgets provides the glorious opportunity to assign number values to everything you consider important. We set a value for a place to live. We set a value for the food we eat. We even set a value for the comforts of controlling the temperature so that everyone stays alive without sleeping in a professional-grade snow suit.
Once we add up all the basics of life, we can add in the extras. Books, movie tickets, a new sprinkler, every variety of streaming service... Just press the “Add to Cart” button, and it goes in the bucket.
No matter how we slice it, our bucket will only hold a finite number of life’s priorities. We need to decide which items we consider essential, and which we can mark as junk.
Unfortunately, we can’t simply move our least-valued expenses into the garage with the rest of the junk. Nor will it do us any good to ask questions like “Does this insurance deductible bring me joy?”
I’ve seen this after-school special. I need to grow-up and confront my competing priorities. Before I’m forced to sell my garage junk and convert my spacious Kia Sportage into an Uber.