What a fantastically privileged and utopian world you must live in where you have the luxury of insulting people for needing to finance basic needs like transportation. Don’t bother responding with “we’re taking about Lamborghinis here” - your “advice” and opinion on this topic is consistent and unwavering whether we’re talking about Ford Fiestas or Ferrari F40s.
I will say though, just like the real Dave Ramsey you’re pretty spot-on at flinging overt insults while calling people out for exactly the same. You even worked a bit of xenophobia in there - well played.
I will now go pour myself a cup of coffee while you type your response about how you lifted yourself up by your bootstraps as a poor white man in America and made every dollar you have entirely on your own with no societal benefit or privilege whatsoever (don’t worry, it’s a big mug, you’ve got a minute).
If paying $1,500 cash for "transportation" as you put it is privileged then I guess that's what I am. Through doing that for many years, working hard and making smart financial sacrifices (lifting myself up by my bootstraps, as you put it) I'm now able to pay cash for much more expensive cars, among other things. But it's not luck or anything magical. Simple concepts that are difficult for many such as: Don't buy what you can't afford.
People's definition of "afford" is what costs them being able to be truly financially independent. They assume that means monthly payment which is what those who sell you the items want you to consider... not the overall price of said item. I know because I used to be in the car industry and discussing monthly payment was laways the objective. It's what allows for the most profit. Who do you think pays that profit? The buyer, with the bank financing.. of course.
The problem is that you seem to attach words like "need" and "transportation" to vehicles like Teslas and Lamborghinis. This in an effort to somehow make them seem crucial. That's just silly. All financing cars does is allow people to buy cars they should NOT be buying in the first place. Not only are they pissing away their hard earned money away on payments and interest but it allows them to get into an even bigger depreciating asset that is also losing money on the back end, day by day.
They're figuratively burning the candle from both ends. They then wonder why there isn't enough money left to buy a house... never once connecting the dots between those two directly-related financial decisions. Nobody HAS to finance a car. Nobody. It's always in their best interest to NOT finance a depreciating asset. Doing so only accelerates their ability to make bad financial decisions.
Only people who find their own self worth in something like their car would see anything I've said as insulting. But you are right about one thing, my opinion on this topic is unwavering because I've made the same stupid decisions because I wasn't as financially educated as I foolishly thought I was.
While I don't blindly subscribe to all of Dave Ramsey's teachings, I know who he is and he's spot on with the financing cars thing. People want to assign emotion that allows them to justify it but the math doesn't support their claims. If you want to discuss finances it would be foolish to ignore basic math as the #'s are pretty obvious for anyone to crunch the math on. The logical approach beats the emotional one on financial topics. That is of course unless the answer will go against their desire to make foolish emotional decisions when it comes to massively expensive depreciating assets. Who would do that though, right? (I'd insert a laughy face here but the fact that this is most of our count is painful and sad)
Lastly, I want to address the claim of xenophobia as it was an unfortunate example of spell check autocorrecting my phrase of "Russian bot" to "Russian boy" which wouldn't even make sense in this context. This forum doesn't allow for user edits so... here we are. It wasn't xenophobia (until AI becomes a protected class, anyway) and only glancingly even registers as a personal insult even to the most sensitive of characters.
Based on the personal attacks the individual I addressed said about me when all I was doing was talking about the facts, I'd say that I'm actually doing a solid job of sticking to the facts on this one.
My apologies.
