A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
Like the perception that you need a nice car is crazy.
Back in my army days I was told my beat up Chevy Malibu was unbecoming of an officer and I needed to buy a new car. So I just started biking and running to work instead.
In hindsight that shaped how I consider transit today, so I guess it ended up benifiting me pretty well in the long term.
Officer showing up on a bike feels way respectable anyway.
Army guys in their mustangs or chargers that they paid 80k for look dumb. Or god forbid those pavement princess trucks.
"E-1 accepted! (27% interest)!!"
My cousin's Chevy pickup (used for work like woodcutting in the late 80s) had a magic broken front end. Even in heavy traffic it had a car-repulsion aura, and everyone gave it the right of way.
Dude has exploded on YouTube in such a short time as a financial advice channel. It's really damn impressive, honestly.
He gives the kind of advice most people should have got from their parents, but most parents don't know much more about finances either.
Oh yeah 100%.
Like his advice isn't the most advanced. But it's for people who legit didn't think there was any problem with getting a 30% interest car loan. Today he had a guy who somehow had a 106% loan?1?!? Of course it was to fix his broken car as well!
His show is to try to shake people and give them the kick in the pants they need to crawl out of a mountain of debt, while also scaring people away from touching bad debt. Which we apparently need a ton in this world...
A 20k car loan at 19 years old is so fucking stupid.
The car brain in these episodes is insane.
Another episode I didn't link had a guy who took out a 40k car loan (stupid charger), had like 20k in credit card debt, and insisted he needed weekly car washes (which he put on his CC).
Like my friends... my kind fellow human beings that I want to not be in debt. Cars are giant money pits, please avoid it as best you can, and if you can't avoid it because of your local infrastructure, get a smaller money pit pleaseeeee.
I found Caleb maybe a month back, and while I am not in the situations he is assisting people with, holy shit is this stuff needed. The USA has no financial literacy education, and poverty is a multigenerational vicious cycle for many various reasons.
Sadly, in many locations (especially Texas where he is based out of) a car is a necessity because of the lack of public transit. A car can quite literally be the difference in being stuck in a depressed town you grew up in or moving up in life. It shouldn’t be this way, but it currently is.
Oh no argument transportation is difficult.
But for so many people there are such cheaper options. A cheaper car, a moped, ebikes. Those work for so many people.
But we have mountains of financed f150s instead.
Cars don't serve us, they serve our employers. It used to be that employers built things like streetcars and other public transit so that employees could get to work and back. You don't need a car to have a completely full, fulfilling life. You need a car to maintain your employable status. If you're not working, you don't fucking need a car. Take a cab for the two or three trips a week that are necessary.