Buying a Mercedes vs. 'Bad debt'
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| Tue, 08-31-2004 - 7:36pm |
We just bought a 1984 Mercedes on ebay (through a reputable seller) for right around a grand. The thing has about 200k on it, but it's a diesel engine which should run at least 4 or 500k. It's in good condition though obviously twenty years old. It looks classy, drives great, will last forever, and best of all, has no car payment!!
Okay, so there will be repairs along the way (though none immediately necessary), but we already set aside money for that every month, and it's still better than a car payment. And if we ever get into trouble again, we might not have a working car, but we also won't have a loan threatening to go into default.
And if we ever sell the car, we'll probably get as much out of it as we spent on it. We love the whole thing so much (and love driving a classy car so much!), we're thinking of selling our 2001 Outback (which is thankfully worth more than we owe on it) and taking the little bit of money we'll get out of it to buy another car-payment-free Mercedes (or possibly a little diesel pick-up if we can ever find one).
The other thing about diesel is, it gets better gas mileage than the equivalent gasoline car, and the fuel is cheaper. Oh, and we plan to convert to bio-diesel (can you say, 37 cents a gallon?), but that's a whole other post in itself.
So, I ask again, why not buy a Mercedes??
(Maybe I shouldn't have said anything--I don't want there to be a run on all the old diesel Mercedes! I might want to buy another one for around a grand, so don't run the prices up!)

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This is interesting information. My husband tells me he already knew about needing to replace the fuel lines, and has already figured it into our cost to do the conversion. He's the one who has done all the research and gathered the group of people who are going in on it together with us.
I'm very interested in the fact that you can buy bio at the pump in Germany. Is it government subsidized? How do the economics of that work? I'm curious, because I've been wondering for a long time why we don't have it at the pump here in the U.S. All the fuel companies and gov't officials and all keep talking about being committed to finding environmentally sound and economically viable alternatives to fossil fuels, and we've got (subsidized) hybrid vehicles and all kinds of other nonsense, but everyone ignores the fact that the technology already exists to run everything from households to cars on completely renewable, environmentally friendly fuels. And yet, these methods are not widely available. Why??
Of course, being the pessimist and paranoiac that I am, I believe it's a huge government/big business conspiracy to keep us dependent on the foreign fuels that various people in power have a vested interest in. But that's just me. :)
Anyway, I would love to hear more about how it works in Germany. Thanks!!!
Heather
bio fuels started out to be a real alternative a few years ago, when it was clear that people indeed were starting to think more about ecologically sensible and at the same time cost effective altrenatives in the energy market. A lot of alternative energy things here are subsidized to make them cheaper and thus able to compete with conservative, ecologically damaging fuels/energy sources. The economical reasoning behind this is pretty simple: Conservative, fossil and nuclear fuel and energy sources are only so cheap because we do not have to pay for the 'collateral damage' that is a very well know long-term effect of them. And since it is not very nice and actually not even economically sensitive when viewed in a broader perspective to make our children pay for our cheap energy today, it pays to subsidize eco frienldy energy sources to help them stand the competition and slowly but surely raise their market share.
Another factor was that Germany has for a few decades now a huge agricultural surplus, many middle sized farms. Sothe idea was: Why pay them with EU money (which is goverenment and taxpayers' money in the end, too), to produce huge amounts of wheat, corn, anything only to destroy it later, or pay them not to farm their fields, when the goverement could also introduce the idea of planting oil seeds and raps (a yellowish flower... no idea if it is the same name in English), from which eco friendly fuel could be produced. The fuel is subsidized (though not heavily so) to keep it at a price about 10 euro cents lower than the average diesel price.
IMHO, it also helped tremendously that six years ago after an general election a coalition government including the Green party was formed, which has strong interest in furthering eco friendly solutions, as well as tries to promote a 'small is beautiful' approach to a lot of things. So it is less techno hype and hybrid cars here, and more the do-it-yourself-solutions and think-about-recycling-your-garbage stuff ;-)
Oh, by the way: There was no law or any such big government action to make petrol companies selling bio diesel - it seems they simply found it worth investing in... maybe because they were suddenly having visions about a new market after there were fastly springing up groups of like minded people (like the one your husband got together) which decided to give bio fuel a try and started to buy aldi's cheapest cooking oil by the gallon...
Greetings, Jordis
ivy_jordis
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