I just bought a car for the first time ever
I've saved a fortune by inheriting cars from family members. I hope my own kids have a similar leg up
Thanks for checking out Nuclear Meltdown. If you’ve enjoyed this blog, consider subscribing.
When my wife and I found out last year that we were going to have a third kid, we realized we would also need a new vehicle. For several years we had been driving a two-door Honda Accord. It wasn’t easy to get two car seats in the back of that car, but the inconvenience seemed like a smaller price to pay than the actual cost of a new ride. But getting three kids, with their car seats, into the back of the coupe would be physically impossible1.
This was at the height of the vehicle shortage last year, so when we arrived at the various car dealerships in our city many had literally no vehicles that would fit our family. One Toyota lot had a single used minivan, but it had nearly 100,000 miles on it, there was a big gash in the side, and the interior smelled strongly of cigarette smoke. They wanted $50,000.
Eventually we gave up and, as our baby’s arrival neared, took a different approach altogether: We bought my parent’s 1990s-era 12-seater Club Wagon van.
In the time since we bought the van we’ve already used it to move multiple family members, haul drywall and lumber, and ferry around still more members of my extended family. And of course our family of five can now go places together.
But what’s really remarkable is that even though I’ve had access to a car for most of my life since turning 162, this is the first time in nearly two and a half decades of driving that I’ve actually bought a vehicle myself. And in that way, my experiences with car ownership highlight the way even relatively boring intergenerational aide can have huge benefits.
Let me go back to the beginning to explain what I mean.
When I turned 16, my paternal grandparents gifted my family their then 12-year-old Nissan Maxima. Though my parents technically owned the vehicle, it was for all intents and purposes my car for the last two years of high school.
I didn’t have a car while a freshman in college (I lived on campus) or as a Mormon missionary in Brazil for two years. But when I returned from Brazil and resumed college I inherited an 1980s Honda Civic that my maternal grandma had originally gifted to one of my cousins. I also very briefly had a 1970s era Cadillac that came from my uncle, but I had to get rid of it because I only had one parking spot at my apartment building.
When I got married, my new in-laws gifted my wife and I their Toyota Camry, and when that car eventually died we ended up with another one of their vehicles, the Accord coupe.
All of which is to say that I have inherited a whole bunch of cars from lots of various family members. And when I finally bought a vehicle for the first time this year, my parents cut me a very good deal3.
Over the years, I’ve saved thousands of dollars thanks to all these free cars. According to the New York Times, the average car payment today is about $700. So getting a good deal on my van and not having to make those payments means that this year alone I’ll save over $7,000. It’s hard to calculate the savings over multiple decades, but if I had been paying just $200 a month since I began driving, that adds up to nearly $60,000. In reality the savings are probably much higher because $200 a month hasn’t been a realistic monthly car payment for most people for a long time. For example If I had been paying $500 per month for just the last 5 years I would have spent $30,000 in that time period alone4.
So, obviously I’m an extremely fortunate and privileged individual. There’s no other way to put it. I come from a middle class family where we didn’t have estates or stock portfolios or summer homes to pass from one generation to another. My mom was often stressed about money, and I had plenty of quintessentially middle class experiences such as paying for my own college5. But even without obvious generational wealth, I was still the recipient of at least tens of thousands of dollars in the form of money saved by not purchasing cars.
There are a few takeaways from this. First, it’d be great if more people had access to cheaper transportation like I did. In other words, extend the privileges I’ve had more widely. I’m not sure how you help more people inherit cars from family members, but I do think such a world would be better than one in which everyone has to buy new cars all the time. An obvious workaround is also to follow a European model, which makes cars less necessary in the first place thanks to dense housing and robust public transit.
But big systemic issues that I can’t control aside, the second takeaway is that I’d love to give my own kids the same kind of leg up that I had. When I was 29, for instance, my wife and I bought our first house. We couldn’t have done that if we had a bunch of car debt and high monthly payments. (We also couldn’t have done it if we were paying off other debts, such as student loans.) If I want my kids to be able to similarly afford a house, or to start a family, giving them an old car is one way to help even if I don’t have a huge pile of cash sitting around.
Which is to say, if I want my kids to at least match my own standard of living I want to try to ensure they’re not weighed down by burdens — financial and otherwise — that I never had to face6. That's not going to be possible for every person or in every situation7. But it's at least the idea that I'm shooting for.
And finally, I’m struck by how my various cars over the years have come from different family members. So, I may have received the equivalent of $60,000 in handouts, but that didn’t come from one single person. The takeaway, then, is that there are real, quantifiable benefits to having a large extended network with whom one maintains relationships. In an era when relationships are framed entirely in emotional terms and things like estrangement are sometimes presented as good outcomes, it turns out you can put a price tag on the benefits of having a big, sprawling clan.
Thanks for checking out Nuclear Meltdown. If you have enjoyed this post, share it with someone.
Headlines to check out this week:
New York’s Hottest Club Is the Catholic Church
“Today, Catholicism again stands athwart political progress and norms governing sex and gender. It violates a liberal-progressive dispensation that many young Americans find both malign and banal. By disparaging traditional gender roles and defining human flourishing in meritocratic terms, progressive moralism militates against young people’s attainment of basic goods: marriage and procreation. Ms. Levy has remarked that she was raised to “get a job.” But her more profound desire was to start a family, a desire that conflicts with the imperatives of meritocracy.”
I recently wrote about the frustration of having to buy a large and expensive car if you want to expand your family. The gist here is that it wasn’t always that way. It wasn’t even that way in the relatively recent past. But we’ve basically created a regulatory system that imposes a minimum $40,000 fee on anyone who wants to have three or more kids.
Over the last two and a half decades I’ve gone without a car for about four years total. Some of that was college and my Mormon mission, and I also went car free for about a year and a half while living in Los Angeles.
I’d like to go on the record here noting that I see cars in cities as more or less a necessary evil. In an ideal world, we’d have walkable cities with great public transit. A city like Amsterdam is a good example; there are cars, but there are even more bikes. Paris is increasingly moving in that same direction, and there are places all over Europe that are pedestrianizing former vehicle space. I love those ideas. Realistically, though, most American cities are a long way off from anything like that, and also not really moving meaningfully in that direction. Ergo, most Americans who can afford a car are going to use one.
Obviously there are people who drive for years and years without spending $60,000. I could have bought beater cars in cash, so one could argue that I’ve actually saved four figures worth of money, not five. The point, though, is less about the exact amount than it is that I’ve benefited significantly from my family.
I paid for college by working, but also by going to a very inexpensive school and by receiving both scholarships and Pell grans.
I think a lot of middle class millennial parents are completely botching this, assuming that their kids will somehow be able to afford college, homes, etc. despite rapidly rising prices. My generation is making the same error the Boomers made when they underestimated the rising costs of basic life events. And in 30 years I wouldn’t be surprised if we see another “Ok Boomer” moment as our kids turn on us for our financial shortsightedness.
I can already think of burdens my kids will have that I didn’t face. Climate change is a good one. We live near a large lake that is drying out, and when it does it’s likely to kick up toxic dust. That’s not something I had to deal with. I also had kids much older than my parents, which means I’ll hit old age when my own kids are younger. That could turn into an emotional or mental burden, or also a financial burden at a point when my kids are less able to bear it. Of course everyone has their own burdens to bear. But I would at least like to avoid adding additional burdens to my kids’ lives.