My family hates buying stuff at the big box stores. Mom and Pop’s, garage sales and thrift stores have always been the staples of good living for the Lang Gang. That’s not all. There’s a slaughterhouse a few hundred feet away from the county border where I get all my meat. A dozen neighborhood gardens offer an amazing variety of produce for the taking and trading. Heck, even my customers have offered everything from power generators to honey during tight times which I gladly accept. This is Georgia after all. When it comes to buying and selling all things automotive, I have also fond an awful lot of very unusual solutions. Namely…
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Posts By: Steven Lang
Holy shit! That’s Mike!” I was flipping through the channels… and there he was. A friend of mine. University of Michigan MBA. Extroverted personality par excellence. Former middle manager at Ford, trying to sell used cars on a public access station. ‘Welcome to the P.T. Barnum world of no shame!” I thought to myself… and God knows I’ve already been there. First there was a Mini (nice car!). Then a PT Cruiser (at least they shined it up). Then the 2078th Impala that was for sale in South Carolina. Then…
Five years ago ‘financing’ was like a cuss word to me. I had spent the prior two years traveling around the country for an auto finance company liquidating 10,000+ repos annually. Seeing repossessed Ford Rangers with $600+ monthly payments and Kias given to anyone with a pulse made me very wary of that world. I stuck with cash cars and made a great worry free living doing that. That was until October 2008 when the cash customer literally disappeared from my landscape.
Knowledge is not always a good thing. Esoteric. Rarified. Just plain old pointless. High school? Anyhow, I have this strange fascination with car reviews. Not the new snuff. But those older wilted beaters that the marketplace has more or less forgotten. You talk to me about a Volvo 240 and my mind will recall a few of these write-up’s and a neat little side story. A 2011 Prius? I would almost rather watch the grass grow.
Who the hell wants a Dodge Daytona? It was a question I was forced to ask myself as a 1991 model with an Iacocca inspired trombone red interior passed through the block. The bidding started at $200 and… well… it sold for $200. Then there was the seller fee, the transport cost, a battery, and pretty soon…
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I was broke. Well let me rephrase that. I was a graduate student. So I guess you could say I was ‘comfortably broke’. My home was rented out to two other less broke students and I had plans to convert part of my garage into yet another bedroom so that I could hopefully get another $400 in monthly income. You could say that it was a beautiful time since I had a scholarship and no real responsibilities. But academia and me were not really meant to be. I had plans…
60 days ago I had this idea thanks to a charity I’ve always admired. I would offer long-term rentals for drivers who weren’t too picky or too rich (in taste). But were in dire need to no fault of their own. There were a lot of safeguards and a few hoops that most folks would need to clear before I finally rented them out. Money up front with a deposit. Full coverage insurance. No DUI’s or suspended licenses. Mileage limitations. The list went on and on but pretty soon I found a niche… and thankfully that niche has finally found me.
I don’t believe in charity. I believe in help and I believe in profit. A sick or dying child may need my help… and I’ll give them everything I can. But an able bodied human being will only get one simple thing from me. A trade. Knowledge, money, work, things, emotions. I’ve traded everything in my life as did my father and grandfather. Horses, mules, cars, houses, fancy foods of every flavor you can imagine. It gave us an education. A family. A “happily ever after”. Everything we ever desired in our lives came true from the pursuit of profit and the willingness to trade… and of course share…
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Back in 1987 the only V8 I knew about was made out of tomatoes and some weird spicy stuff. I was all of 14 then, and my concerns in life were little more than the infrequent dating opportunity and eating out (my mom didn’t believe in cooking). There was college… but that seemed as far away as the drop dead gorgeous brunette who sat two desks in front of me in Spanish class. I was terrible in Spanish, and with good reason. Back then I remember trying in vain to read my Spanish homework at the local Audi customer’s lounge. A place my mom frequently visited and despised for 5000 good reasons. Later that evening, a 60 minutes expose would result in our Audi being taken straight to a dealership one more time. But this time the sign up front said ‘Acura’.
$110 an hour. That’s what certain European dealerships will charge for their $15 an hour technicians. Now granted you’re paying for the nice marble floor and a waiting room filled with old magazines, cable news and pretzels. But still that’s an awful lot of money to part with. In fact, a lot of dealerships make an exceptional living out of highballing the repair cost and lowballing the trade-in value once the customer sees the repair estimate. One outfit in particular with nearly ten dealerships in my neck of the woods clears the two million dollar mark just on this homegrown recipe for consumer disaster. So how do you avoid it?
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Hybrids give you better fuel economy. Hybrids save the environment. Hybrids will even shine your shoes and make trees grow out of your ass. So say the left wing folks who are hated by the right wing folks who are then hated back by the left wing folks for being hated by those all too mean and hateful right wing folks. Where does that leave the rest of us who just drive these machines? Well, in surprisingly solid ground once you take politics out of the equation. A hybrid can…
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I’m a crook, and I’m glad to admit it. Back when GM was trading in the 20’s I decided to sell the company short. Way short. In fact I didn’t cover my short until GM’s price reached a bankruptcy teetering $3 a share. The reasons were endless… of course. But the crux of my decision was based on the very same observation Goldman Sachs had with American’s sub-prime mortgages… the books were essentially cooked.
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A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Well the hell with that! I’m going to fly if I have to travel even half the distance. I suffer enough these days. Traveling 500+ miles a week in Atlanta is a brutal punishment for any sane soul and mine is sometimes jaded to the point of h-e double hockey sticks.
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My Dad worked with the same company for sixty years. His first days were spent making coffee, learning English, and finding any opportunities for him and the company. It wasn’t easy. Back then America was in a recession with unfathomable debt and a dollar that could seemingly buy all the remnants of a battle scarred Europe. Today we have all the elements of the past. Except America is still fighting the wars, the dollar is weak, and the only thing that our country can seemingly buy is more debt… and time. With such lighthearted thoughts in my head this afternoon, I decided to go for a long walk.
I am not in the ‘keeper’ business. Cars to me have always been an investment asset, like stocks, bonds, and a good accountant are for most other folks. My daily drivers are supposed to make me money. But then I have to balance this against one other unavoidable fact: I’m married.
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