New cars and the true cost.

I am sure you have all heard of sticker shock in relationship to any given item. I experienced a bit of sticker shock today when I saw the statistic that Americans have over 1 Trillion dollars of car debt. You read that correctly, Trillion with a T. In a society where debt is passed out like candy, think about these two things before you take your next credit plunge: Face the reality of what we need vs what we want and face the truth of what will happen if you by a cheap used car and pay cash.

• To start with you need to face reality and consider the cost of buying things like a new car that will lose 11% of its value the moment you drive it off the lot. Ask yourself WHY, why do I really need a new car. The key word there is need, we have very few things in America that are truly a "need". We need food and water to live, we want a new car and nice things. So I ask again why do you NEED a new car and how much is it really going to cost you? 

• There are few things that depreciate faster than cars yet people continue to spend massive amounts of money on them. Now don't get me wrong, I like having a nice car as much as the next person and there is something to be said about reliable transportation. I have been there I paid $22,000 for my last car and sold it for $7,000 after I paid it off. It was the worst investment I have ever made. I now drive an 8 year old truck that I paid cash for, it is clean and reliable which is all anyone really needs in a vehicle. 

• There is a psychological side to having a nice car. Society has conditioned us that having a nice car is equated with success. Just stop and think about that for a second, you paid 20, 30 or 40 thousand dollars for a car. A car that you could not afford to buy so you financed it for five to seven years. This is a sign of a successful person in America today and one that millions of people buy into.  

Call a car what it is. Plain and simple, a car is a tool and like anything else it is there for a purpose. A car is nothing more than a method of getting us from point A to point B, nothing more nothing less. A car doesn’t better your quality of life, it doesn’t improve your health and it doesn’t make you more successful (no matter what society says). So break the cycle, if you have a car payment throw a little extra every month and pay it off. Drive it till it becomes more expensive to fix than to keep. When it does become more expensive to fix than to get rid of pay cash for your next car. It may not be the nicest car in your friend group but it will likely be one of the few paid for cars amongst you all. 

Hope, a simple word but one which carries with it the very fabric of existence. The effects of hope are undeniable and should not be underestimated. 

I am going to tell you why I believe hope is the most important motivator that exists. There are not many things that can break a person as quickly as a lack of hope can. This is true of any situation that you want to apply it to: goals, lifestyle, freedom, marriage, finances or even a shipwrecked victim. I will tell you how to keep hope alive or reignite it if it has gone out. 

To begin with let us define hope. 

• Hope is defined as-a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen. That is generally true but I believe hope is that unseen force that keeps us moving forward and gets us out of bed every day. Deeper than that is the fact that will power is a finite thing. We only have so much will power to go around beyond that we need something more to pull us through the hard times.

Take goals for example

• Any goal is really fine, the specific goal doesn’t really matter because the underlying concept is the same. Any goal you set has a largely psychological side to it. It is not something tangible that you can touch or feel. Despite this it is always in the back of your mind (literally) telling you you're going to succeed or fail.

•  Dave Ramsey (a well know financial coach) advocates paying your debts off from smallest to largest. This may seem counter intuitive because it would seem to make sense to pay the highest interest debt off first. Paying off your smallest debt gives you a feeling of hope in the form of progress. If you don't feel like you're making progress that will power is going to fade and you're going to lose hope. No hope means what's the point of continuing to try? 

POW and Shipwrecked victims know it well

• These are both classic example that many have probably read in a book or seen in a movie. Take a shipwrecked victim on a deserted island or a prisoner in a foreign land for example. Both are in some of the most extreme circumstances you could imagine. What keeps a person going in a situation where they are in extreme or complete solitude? If you said HOPE then gold star for you. Hope can take many different forms, for a prisoner it may take the form of hope that he will be rescued or hope that he will see his family again. Hope will look different for different people but without it most will fail.

Don't let hope die

So all this to say that you need to keep hope alive. If you are lacking hope then try re-evaluating your goals. Set smaller more achievable goals or set daily, weekly and monthly goals. You don’t need to focus on the final or end result, if you are struggling just focus on today or tomorrow. Focusing on a goal that's to big can seem unachievable and cause you to lose hope of ever reaching it. Celebrate your success, don’t wait till you reach your final goal to celebrate. You need to keep hope alive and celebrate the weekly or monthly successes.