I find that I am far calmer when I am driving not my own car. That is not to say I am more careless when driving other people’s cars. I still drive defensively, and avoid the assholes on the road as best possible. (Because the best way to win a fight is to not get in one in the first place.) But for some reason, I am more amped up when I am driving my BMW M2. It’s skin in the game: when the car is bought with your own money, you are wont to stress more about its condition.
Conversely, when something is borrowed, people tend to treat it worse. The fastest car in the world is a rental car. At my workplace, you should see the state of some of the laptops we get in return from users. They treat the computers with utter carelessness. I want to say they wouldn’t treat their own laptops like that, but I have to wonder. How a person do anything is how they do everything.
I have to say, it is nice to drive around with less stress. Perhaps I should lease a new car every three years, though that is a hefty price to pay for a slight increase in peace of mind on the road. Not sure about that one.
Because outside of rent, the automobile is our second largest expense. Spending unnecessarily high on cars is how people fall behind in personal finances. I would know. People talk of cutting back on the three dollar daily coffee (it’s probably six dollars now with inflation) in order to get ahead, and it is stupid. The much bigger lever is the car. You can have all the Starbucks you want when you are not spending hundreds (even thousand) of dollars on transportation per month.
You know what also would lower my stress while driving my own car? Not owning such a “nice” car in the first place. I might as well turn in my car enthusiast card in now…
Lunch time.