If You Have To Ask Price, You Can’t Afford New Car

My family and I find ourselves in trying circumstances this week.

We are in the market for a new car.

Thank you. Your condolences are truly appreciated.

I’d appreciate it even more if somebody could answer this question for me: How on God’s green earth can anybody afford a new car?

Or to put it more precisely: Who in the heck do I look like to you? Bill bloody Gates? Paul bloomin’ Allen? Jimmy “Million Dollars” Marks?

I know for a fact that ordinary Americans have managed new cars before. I see thousands of people in their late-model cars every day, gliding happily by with their remote keyless entry and their retractable cupholders. Not all of them are neurosurgeons.

Or are they? Of course not. Some of them are All-Star shortstops.

Anyway, we decided we needed retractable cupholders, too, darn it. The problem is, we have been out of the new car market for almost 10 years, so we were not fully prepared for what we would find when we plunged back in. We visited a few showrooms and credit unions, then we quietly slipped over to a sanitarium and checked ourselves in. We hope someday to fully recover.

The sticker price is part of the problem, of course. Yet I find the sticker price to be alarming only in an abstract way, like the national debt. Both numbers are too large for the human mind to fully comprehend.

“Oh, this is an even larger number than the last one,” I’d say, almost admiringly, while checking out a sticker price. “Kids! Come over here and look at this one. It’s a whopper!”

The real problem is the monthly payment. When the dealer crunched the numbers and announced the projected monthly payment, I remained in denial for a long time.

“No,” I said, patronizingly. “You don’t understand. I asked you for the monthly payment. Not the down payment. Not the annual payment. Not the almighty NASA budget, for crying out loud.”

So they repeated the number and I was forced to confront reality. I was staring at a monthly payment that rivaled my house payment, although I will admit that a new car might be a better value. (My house has no retractable cup holders.)

To make matters worse, there’s the length of the loan. This payment was for a six-year loan, which means that I would be making that exorbitant payment far after the warranty runs out, far after the tires wear out, far after the brakes need to be replaced. I would be making that payment until the exact day that the transmission explodes, at which point I would begin making monthly payments to the boys over at Joe’s Tranny Farm.

Whatever happened to the good old days, when the payments lasted three years and so did the cars?

Oh, well. We have only a couple of alternatives. One is to buy a late-model used car. This is actually what we set out to do, but then we saw the used car prices. Our choices seemed to be: (1) We could go broke buying a car with 30,000 miles on it and an attractive spit-up stain from somebody else’s baby, or; (2) We could go broke buying a new car. Tough call.

The other thing we could do is lease. The way I understand leasing, I pay through the nose for a down payment, and then I pay through the nose every month for three years. Then the nice people come and take the car away. Then I go through the whole process all over again every three years until I die.

We may end up choosing one of these options, I don’t know. However, I have come up with several other more creative alternatives, which I will share here with you: Lower our sights and think “Yugo.”

Simplify our lives, forgo cars altogether and walk to Banff for our vacation this year.

Go to Hertz and rent a car every day for the rest of my life. It may be cheaper than buying, assuming I can lay my hands on enough coupons.

The other alternative is to forget the whole thing and keep the same piece-of-junk car we’ve been driving since the Reagan years. This seems to be the ideal choice.

Except our old car has no retractable cupholders. We must have them. We will have them. Damn the expense.

, DataTimes MEMO: To leave a message on Jim Kershner’s voice-mail, call 459-5493. Or send e-mail to jimk@spokesman.com, or regular mail to Spokesman-Review, P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210.