solowingpixy
the resident car guy
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User ID: 410
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
5d ago
I was car shopping back then and while I can't comment on the lightly used market the mid and low range were reasonable (I was at a food delivery company at the time, so that was the sort of shopping I did.) if you weren't looking for a truck or SUV. My goal was under 10 years old, 100k miles or less, and under $10K and there was a decent selection even accounting for my weird tastes (I wanted something not silver, white, or black, and it had to have a stick shift.). I was closing in on a Mazda 2, and early 2010s models were running for about $7500 at the time.
I actually blundered into a private party deal that I couldn't pass up, a loaded one year old Mazda 3 with 15K miles for $17K. It was retired lady's recently passed husband's car, a stick shift that she couldn't drive, had one minor scrape on the bumper, and the interior reeked of cigarettes but otherwise it was mint and I knew how to fix the cigarette smell so I offered her NADA "rough trade-in" and she took it. The bank had it valued at $21.5K, and on that note interest rates were lower then. I was able to put 20% down and finance the rest of it for 2% interest.
Funny enough, I never liked that car all that much (It's a perfectly nice car but doesn't feel particularly "fun" to drive. It's too SUV-like and the tall gearing makes it feel slow.) and sold it once but wound up getting it back (The guy I sold it to died and left it to me because he owed me a ton of money.). I will say that it's been perfectly reliable and if I was looking to recommend a compact car to someone who doesn't want to pay the Honda/Toyota tax I would go with a 2nd or 3rd Gen Mazda 3 without hesitation.
By contrast, the lightly used market for stuff I want now is mostly ridiculous. An 8-10 year old Civic Si with under 100K miles runs over $20K and even the cheapest Type-Rs are pushing $30K, with a lightly used example pushing $40K. Another issue for normies is that the mid-2010s had several "dud" cars that appear nice but have major problems that should be avoided and infest the "affordable" end of the used car market. I'm talking about Nissans with their CVTs, Ford Focuses with the Powershift automatic, Hyundai/Kia products with the Theta engines that blow up, GM SUVs with the Ecotec 4 cylinders, Fords with the 3.5 V6 that has the nightmare water pump, etc.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
6d ago
There really weren't a lot of old people around in 1926 period, let alone a government subsidized upper-middle class of retirees. In 1920 less than 1/20 Americans were over the age of 65. Now it's 1/6.
That there were bad years in the 70s and early 80s doesn't change the fact that no one under the age of 40 has experienced anything like the sustained economic growth we had from 1985-2005. The 1970s sucked compared to the 50s and 60s but still had faster growth than the 2000s, 2010s, or 2020s so far.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
6d ago
The Twitter generational war, be it over sandwiches or houses and cars, has been dumber than usual this week, and that's saying something.
My thoughts as a mid-millennial who mostly missed the crash (not being able to score even any variety of job as a freshman in college was irritating, but otherwise it wasn't that bad) but fucked around and failed to launch throughout his 20s (I delivered food with a side of dispatching for 14 years LMAO, but since that gravy train ended have managed to use those experiences to switch to an office job in trucking that appears to have potential to make a real career out of.) are otherwise as follows:
Used cars really are irritatingly expensive at any price level right now relative to the late 2010s, but it's not Cash for Clunkers that caused it, but the loss of production during the Great Recession and Covid years (along with inflation) making either 15 year old beaters or lightly used cars more expensive. That said, even if it feels a touch overpriced compared to the $2K shitboxes of the 2010s (Back then, my pick for best pizza delivery bang for the buck was a Bush era Ford Focus.), one can get a 15-20 year old Corolla on Marketplace for $3500-$5000 depending on one's tolerance for ugly and it'll probably work fine. If not, it's a Corolla. Get on Youtube, buy some tools from Walmart/Harbor Freight, and fix it, or find a friend who can and will (Car guys tend to identify themselves by talking about them all the time.). Don't want to pay the Toyota tax/want something nicer? Get a Mazda 3. In my experience they're very reliable and have depreciated more heavily (Mine has 100K miles on it and the only non-maintenance thing I've had to do to it was replace the belt tensioner, a pain in the ass but the part was $30 on Rock Auto.).
Pack a lunch to work or spend $28 on Doordash? Who the hell eats lunch at work anyway? Unless my boss is paying for it I don't eat lunch at work; I'd rather work through it and leave early or play on my phone. If I had to eat out and pay for it, there's an Italian place downtown that does a two slice or two Chicago dog and drink special for $7.
All that said, my broad take is that things really are worse than they were in the mid/late 2010s. I spent that decade as a drunk slinging burritos and sushi in a college town and never had money problems in spite of an outrageous bar budget and my only real quality of life sacrifice was living in various shitty apartments with cheap/freecycled furniture and having to do laundry at a laundromat. I have a real salaried job now and make more money than I did back then (and without beating the shit out of my car) but I still feel broke (and objectively am; that career change was brutal) in a way that I didn’t/wasn’t in the 2010s. Job hunting in ‘24/’25 was a miserable, hopelessness inducing experience and I doubt I’d have gotten the job I have now without knowing my current boss from my time bartending.
As for the Boomers/Xers and quality of life, I think their real privilege/crime isn’t so much a money or standard of living thing, but fertility related. Boomers and Gen X were the last to spend their younger years in an America with a relatively normal age distribution instead of the rapidly aging gerontocracy we’re in now. From 1930 to 1980 the median age in the US increased from 26.5 to 30 years old. From 1980 to the present that number increased from 30 to 40 years old, mostly from 1990-present.
In 1926 the median American was around 26 years old. Thanks to the baby boom, the median wasn't much older in 1970, 28, and was 30 in 1980. Today, it's 39, and will likely be over 40 by 2030. The old have never been so proportionately numerous.
This is aggravated by the fact that economic growth has been declining since the 1980s, and especially since the end of the 90s. Barring 2021, all but the oldest Millennials never experienced 4% GDP growth as a member of the labor force. All but the youngest of Gen Z have never experienced 3% GDP growth in the workforce, again barring 2021.
I, uh, don't worry about my parents' health much. There's nothing I can do about it. They're both incredibly stubborn people who will (not) take care of themselves, bonus points for the stepmom.
I will say that I wasn't ready for the moment I felt compelled to protect my father (a big, imposing Marine veteran) in a physical altercation. He ran his mouth and picked a bar fight he couldn't win, the other guy fought dirty, and in a flash I went from being as annoyed with his drunken bullshit as everyone else in the bar to being willing to fuck that guy up or get my ass kicked trying if he wouldn't take my offer of "this is over; we're leaving". I was...32?
Funny enough, I must've made an impression (I can't fight for shit but I'm crazy and loud, inherited that from mom's side.) because that incident took on a fishing story-like life of its own where I allegedly brandished a chair in my father's defense.
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