(December 2, 2016 at 10:18 pm)mh.brewer Wrote: Pay cash when you can for new automobiles. Paying interest on something that depreciates instantly, do the math.
Another way to look at this: don't buy a car unless it's at least three years old. It will have lost considerable value within the first three/four years but should still be in good/great shape. For luxury cars that rule is more like six-to-eight years.
Also... I don't have a budget-- I keep a ledger. Instead of planning my spending beforehand, I track it as I go. Looking at my ledger tells me how much I'm actually spending on stuff, including stuff I need (food, mortgage, utilities) and stuff I can do without (entertainment, miscellaneous items). Knowing where my money is really going is a great help in figuring out where to cut back.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
