I’m Cured, I’m Cured!

Well, as many of you might know, I’ve been spending an embarrassing amount of time mulling over the purchase of a new car. Not because we REALLY need one, but rather because I got a wild hair in the very southern region of my back. I had been secretly searching through all the online used car aggregators (Traderonline, Dealernet, cars.com etc) looking to see what was out there. I guess I was hoping that a car would jump out at me and suck me in. It didn’t happen. Every car I saw had baggage. Not the baggage like, “previously smoked in”, “high miles”, or “needs work”, but rather baggage like, “That’s going to lose a lot of it’s value”, “I bet that costs a fortune to repair”, and “Insurance and gas mileage on that would be brutal”.

Well, as of today, I’m going to consider myself “healed”. I spent some time with some good friends of ours from college. I really admire these friends because we share many views on politics, consumerism, religion etc. They spent quite a bit of time in a 3rd world country and have a completely different view of American life. They have seen how a high percentage of the rest of the world live and feel embarrassed when they think of all the things they have. (And they live in a very small house and don’t spend a lot of money frivelously). While we don’t live quite as modest a lifestyle as they do, I still use them as a ruler for how we should live our lives. Needless to say, we don’t need a new car.

One great thing that I’m excited about is that they are planning on taking another trip to Haiti and are planning on taking some computers with them to give to a school there. They’ve got to do it “on the cheap” and I think I’ll really be able to help them in a couple ways. I’ve got good connections for cheap computers, and also work in the computing industry and plan on helping build and configure these PC’s for them to take. We’ll donate some money to the cause, and as much time as needed to make it work.

I think that’s one of the many reasons that we love these friends of ours. I don’t seem to be able to take the initiative to do these things on my own, (but we’ve got to get better at it to help influence the kind of person our daughter becomes), but we do love to participate with our friends on some of these kinds of projects when they tell us about them. I think it’s important to put all of our financial goals and situations in perspective. All you really need to do is check out the “Global Rich List” to see where you stand relative to everyone else on the planet, and it really brings you back down to earth.