I took this off Twitter, and posted in on FB, and got a lot of interesting replies:
Did you buy your first car, or did your parents buy it for you?
It's a question about generational wealth, clearly, and the answers I am seeing reflect that.
Me: I didn't have a car at all until I was 30 -- I got around by bus and bicycle before that -- but when I was 30, my parents gave me their ancient Dodge Ram pickup. I had driven this from time to time when I was living with them, before I went to graduate school, which tells you how old it was! But I loved that little truck, even if it wouldn't go uphill. (I had every route in Fayetteville which didn't require going up a hill memorized -- I knew most of them already, of course, from riding the bike around town.)
What about you?
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| Kind of what my truck looked like, only mine was darker tan |
17 comments:
When I was in high school, my sister and I shared an ancient Olds that my father had gotten well over a decade previously as part of a settlement for being willing to quit a company without suing them (you had to turn the key just right or you would flood the engine).
Then at college graduation my parents bought me a manual 2 door Hyundai Accent without air conditioning, but since they didn't also buy insurance and we couldn't afford insurance, I couldn't take it with me so my sister got that car for a couple of years (after she'd managed to get it into a couple of accidents). After we got it into an accident during a blizzard on the way to a job interview it would no longer pass the annual inspection (too many pointy bits) and getting it fixed would cost more than buying another car so we traded it in for a four-door automatic Hyundai accent with air conditioning that we bought with the money we'd saved on rent from working as RAs.
My in-laws bought my DH a cheap used Chevy in college so he could drive himself home, but it stopped working beyond repair before college ended (through no fault of his) and they didn't replace it.
We didn't have a car that could go uphill until we had real jobs and bought a Honda civic!
I think "technically" might be my answer. I'm about a year older than my next-younger brother. I didn't get a car, either as a gift or on my own, when I got my license. My mom did buy a used car about 3 weeks before my brother got his license, which was about 7-8 weeks before I left for college-- a bit under 1000 miles from where I grew up. She told us that it was for both of us to share, but I was gone for most of the 1st year. When we tried the "share" thing the following summer, he scheduled things during my time to such a degree that my mom decided to take me to/from my 8-5 job on her way to/from her own job, rather than tell him to knock it off. His job was evenings, so it should have worked out better than it did. I think he resented having "his" car become shared again, and he successfully won that fight. (Which apparently still annoys me when I think about it now.)
If you don't count that car, which I wouldn't, then I bought my own. Also in my 30s, after living in cities where a car wouldn't have made sense.
I bought my first car when I was 35, after getting my first "real" academic job (visiting assistant professor in Idaho). It was a Dodge Neon, and the payments ($235/month) were more than my rent at that point.
My parents bought it. The brand was Matchbox.
True story: My parents bought my brothers cars when they graduated from high school (used cars, but still usable) but they explicitly told me, "We won't be buying you a car when you graduate because we'll have to pay for your wedding someday."
My first car was a manual 1984 Toyota Tercel (it was 14 years old at the time!) which eventually wouldn't shift up into second gear or down into fourth. My second car was an ancient mini Toyota truck whose alternator fell off. My third car, in college, was an ancient Hyundai Accent whose alternator ALSO fell off. (Are we sensing a theme?) And then I didn't have a car after college; I walked and rode the bus in grad school, and cadged rides to the grocery.
These were all from my parents. You can deduce that they had more money than *their* parents, but still not quite enough for a nice car for the kids.
The spouse had a Honda Civic (with hand-crank windows! this is the car he bought as a single 21 year old dude!) when we got married and then we bought a minivan when Kid 3 arrived. I've never actually bought or technically owned a car (the titles are both in the spouse's name).
We are planning to buy another car when the now-22-year-old Civic finally bites it but we are too cheap to replace it until it literally dies by the side of the road.
Bev: My parents *also* provided cars for my brothers starting in high school -- my brothers didn't own them, my parents did, but the cars were my brothers' in every other sense. Like, they drove them off to college and used them there. They were old wrecks like the truck they eventually gave me, but still.
They didn't tell me I didn't get a car because of my someday future wedding, though!
I did not buy a car for my kid, who still doesn't have one. He lives in Fayetteville, which has an excellent bus system; and when he has to go somewhere he can't reach on the bus, I drive up there and take him. I *will* help him buy his first car when we reach that point.
One thing I find interesting is how it just seemed normal to have an old car that was falling apart and we'd never bring it in to get it fixed, we'd just deal with whatever the problem was so long as it still drove. I guess that was true with my mom's ancient VW bug as well-- we could literally see the street through the rust holes in the floor, and it only ever went into the shop for problems when it was clear the brakes no longer worked (just got flashbacks to some really dangerous situations, as this happened more than once) or the battery could not be resuscitated (also happened multiple times, but more inconvenient than scary).
I guess this is another one of those things about being higher SES. If the attention needed light goes off, we take the car in. We'd get a car that regularly flooded the engine at ignition fixed if that were still a thing. We did keep my last car (that Hyundai accent we bought in graduate school) way longer than we should have, but it was spending a lot of time in the shop those last couple years.
Yeah, that's our current practice -- drive it as long as it runs, only take it to the shop if it actually won't run.
We drove around with defective airbags on our current car for most of two years, because it's our only car and the local dealer insisted we had to bring it in and leave it. The last time we did this, we had to rent a car for a week, which was $$$$. So we just crossed our fingers until the recall people found us a place that would do it while we waited.
We did buy cars for our kids when they were in high school, primarily because we live in a place where you can't get anywhere without a car and we frequently had to be on opposite ends of the county. However, they were always junker cars in the $1500-$2000 range. Because my son-in-law is a great mechanic, we kept a couple of cars running past 200,000 miles, and the longest-lived one was more than 20 years old when it finally bit the dust. I was in my 50s when I finally had a chance to buy a car to please myself alone, without reference to anyone else's needs. It felt like an immense luxury, even though it was just an ordinary Camry.
It's partly about generational wealth, of course, but it's also partly about the environment the kid lives in. Relatively poor families in the country will buy their kids a beater so they can get to school and back on days when they have after school stuff, or so they can get to a job. City and suburban kids, not so much.
Anonymous -- That's true! Almost all my students have cars, because we're a commuter college and the campus itself has almost nothing within walking distance. And few of my students have generational wealth.
But it's also true that those with new-ish cars bought them themselves, while the parent-bought cars are (as you note) beaters.
My first car was given to me by my parents who inherited it from my mom’s aunt. My second car my parents gave me $3000 for the down payment (vw jetta) and I paid the rest off in 2y, since I was 25 and had a good job at the time.
When I learned to drive, I used the family car. I had to buy my first car of my own when I was in college. I had intended to buy a $5000 clunker but my parents fussed about it until I took out a loan and bought new instead. They were worried that I didn't have the time or mechanical skills to deal with a hoopty even though our family mostly drove those for years. It was true, I didn't have either, but it was also a lot of money I spent on that first car. Ironically, that's the car I ended up "gifting" to my dad as part of the process to cut ties with him.
I just set up a hardship fund for our graduate students: all of the first four requests were for car repairs. In one case, "well, it hasn't been able to pass inspection for a couple of years, but I don't know whether it's really a hardship because I can still drive it." I did not realise how huge an issue this is.
Ewan: It really is. Good for you for setting up the fund.
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