I'm Retired! Now what?

So what does someone do on their first, official day of retirement after they’ve lived through a career of working for every cent they own and spent their life penny pinching to the point where they have copper under their fingernails.  Well, you go out and spend a ton of money!  A couple of months ago my wife Margaret and I had to depart with a dear friend.  This dear friend was our 2013 Nissan Altima which I used to call Columbus.  I gave the car the name of Columbus because when we drove it on vacations, I often felt a bit like Columbus.  He was an explorer who thought he was going somewhere by the longest route possible.  Landed in a place that wasn’t anywhere close to where he thought he was, and returned home proudly thinking he had visited some place that he actually hadn’t.  Yes, that kind of describes some of our past road trips.  But as far as our Nissan was concerned, Columbus had sailed its last voyage.

I’m a proud member of the old school when it comes to owning a vehicle which means, “Drive the blessed thing until the wheels fall off!”  And this is what we kind of did to Columbus.  After 280,000 miles the car’s transmission finally bit the dust, leaving me with the tough decision of shelling out $4,500 to fix a car that carried a book value of $4,300 or just junking the thing.  Okay, maybe not such a tough choice.  However, the real work came when we set out on the grueling task of finding a new car.

Unlike most folks, I had NEVER bought a new car.  I came from a family that lived by the rule of “everything is better after someone else has used it a bit.”  The last new vehicle my parents bought was a 1961 Apache Chevy truck that came with no air conditioner or stereo of any kind.  The only new car Margaret had ever purchased was a 1980 Camero right after she got her first job.  In fact, since I bought my first car (used Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme) at the age of seventeen, I’ve only owned a whopping total of eight cars!  One of my former co-workers, a lady from the Philippines, went on a rant one day saying that she could only afford to buy a new car every TWO years and therefore wasn’t living the American dream!  Well, on my first day of retirement I was ready to go forth and grab the American dream!

My first realization was quite simply, “When did the American dream get so darn expensive!”   Okay, I haven’t been car shopping for thirteen years, and I felt a bit like Rip Van Winkle.  I woke up after a long nap to discover that the average car now cost more than my first house!  “The average car,” a salesman told me, “Comes in at the price of around fifty grand.”   Fifty grand!?!?  That used to be considered lottery winning bucks!   Okay, my financial advisor told me I was good for fifty thousand for a new car (she had just bought a new Tesla), but it’s the principle by gosh!

Since this was going to be Margaret’s car, I let her do all the test driving.  I just set back in the passenger’s seat and acted like I was understanding everything that the salesman was dishing out when he was trying to explain all the gadgets and thingmajigs these new vehicles were packing.  More than once I wanted to ask, “Where’s the CD player?”  At least I didn’t inquire about an eight-track tape player.  Yes, my first car had one.   With all the bells and whistles I almost expected a hologram to take the driver’s seat and drive the thing for us.  I wouldn’t object to a hologram of race car driver Danica Patrick driving me around.

And what’s the deal with all the kiddo, car salesmen?  During our adventure, we might have had a couple of salesmen who looked like they could be pushing thirty, but for the most part, all the little buckeroos who were showing us cars looked as though they had just switched to solid foods a few months ago.  When they disappeared to go talk to their managers I had to wonder if it was just time for their afternoon feeding.  Such made me feel like launching into a rant about the good ole days when we had some cars that ran on regular gas while others ran on Ethyl and Premium.  I did mention how I used to change my own oil back in my teen years just so I didn’t seem like a total looser when it came to car knowledge.  However, I chose to leave out the part regarding how we used to just let the old oil pour down on our gravel driveway out by the barn.

Margaret suggested that the reason that all these salesmen were such youngsters was because these guys were still full of youthful spit and fire which is required to convince old codgers like me to pay such a fortune for a new car.  Actually, Margaret had her heart set on an SUV this time around, and we looked at Hondas, Toyotas, Jeeps, Fords, Chevy’s, GMC’s and KIA’s, but what she fell in love with was a Subaru.  “What was so special about the Subaru?” I asked.  They had the color she liked.  I would say, “That’s such a woman thing.”  But that would be sexist. 

Now the big question we faced was settled along the lines of, do we get the meager SUV without all the thrills and chills are do we go the whole nine yards and shell out the additional twelve grand for all the cool stuff?  Yes, twelve grand, which is more than three times what my first car cost.  Being the loving husband though, I told her to get what she wanted.  This notion erupted into the argument concerning the fact that she wanted all the cool stuff, but she just didn’t want to pay for it.  Then she tried to convince herself that maybe she just didn’t need all that space-aged, sci-fi crap.  Such a thought is always followed up by the, “Maybe we can get the cool stuff next time” theory.    Such led me to think, “Next time?”  Indeed, thirteen years had passed since we last bought a car.  Next time would be….  Well, I didn’t want to think about that.  I was also tossing in the fact that we had the bucks.  We might as well splurge a bit.  Of course, while I’m telling her to live a little and she’s ranting about all the house repairs we need to do, the twelve-year-old who is selling us the car was probably thinking, “Wait a minute!  Is the man telling the woman to get what she wants, and the woman is saying they should conserve their money?   What the heck!”  Of course, such a thought would be sexist.  So we wound up shelling out close to fifty grand on a beautiful Subaru Forester Touring SUV with more cool stuff than I’ll ever figure out how to use (no CD player though) with the color that Margaret had fallen in love with, Dark Mahogany Pearl.   As long as it wasn’t pink, I was happy.