Farewell Collecting Budget

[Toy Ranch]

The reason I've had a fairly lavish collecting budget for the past few years has mostly been because I got credit cards and car notes all paid off and have been able to use much of the money that used to go to paying those on monsters.  About a week ago, while on the freeway and at speed, a car had a blowout, fishtailed around, and forced my wife into a wall.  Everyone walked away unhurt, which is the big thing, but her car is totaled.  He had insurance, but still....

We're waiting on the settlement offer.

I have an '02 truck.  It's been very dependable.  Last summer we did an 8000 mile road trip and I had to service a hose clamp the whole trip.  It has 130k miles and over the past month I've noticed some "changes".  Then the engine light came on.  I took it in and the repair estimate exceeded the value of the truck.  Plus, once the get in there, there's always more.  I pulled it out of the shop and traded it in on a new truck.  My wife has been trying to talk me into trading it for a couple years, but really it ran fine and no payments to make, so no reason to cut off my monster funds, but I knew this day was coming and now its here.

My new truck is cool!  Not as cool as monster stuff, but I have a lot of that so it'll hold me while I try and get this one paid off as soon as I can.

[hammerfan]

I hope you struck a hard bargain. It's a buyer's market now and they should have been falling all over you to sell.

[ChrisW]

Good luck on the new truck.
does it have a bigger bed? More room to haul more cool stuff in...!

[Toy Ranch]

I hope you struck a hard bargain. It's a buyer's market now and they should have been falling all over you to sell.

After we were done, the salesman asked me if I negotiate the price of milk and cereal at the grocery store.    I worked him and the finance guy for about 9 hours total.  He had half the dealership mad at him by the time we were finished.  When we started, he thought he was going to sell me a used 2007 truck with 40k miles and less features for $3000 less and 2 points higher on the rate than we ended up with on the new one.

[Toy Ranch]

Good luck on the new truck.
does it have a bigger bed? More room to haul more cool stuff in...!

Regular size bed, but big enough.

[Toy Ranch]

Here's all the fancy stuff.





It's got a deal that syncs up my phone and ipod so I can push a button on the steering wheel and say "Call home" and it calls home and I can talk on it just blabbing away like they're sitting next to me.  Also I can say "play album killer" and it'll start up Alice Cooper's Killer album. 

[preyer]

kind of a bittersweet exchange, huh?

focusing on the positive, that's a nice truck. and thank you for buying an american hunk of junk as opposed to a foreign hunk of junk. it amazes me how people can gripe about the economy and then hop into their kia as if there's no correlation. (this is a separate rant, lol.) nice ride.

do i negotiate with the grocer on the price of milk? what a stupid argument. i'd have told him no, of course not, that's not within my power as a milk consumer and no one on an immediate level i have access to is living off a commission by selling milk. were you a salesman dependent on a commission, yes, i'd negotiate. otherwise, this is what i do when i buy milk ~ i wait for a sale and buy it at the most reasonable (not always the cheapest! why is this concept so hard for people to grasp?) price. call his argument a misnomer (or any word containing three syllables) and he'd be stumped as how to rebut. besides, the buyers of goods to be sold at retail absolutely have negotiating power, and they ostensibly negotiate on our behalf. betcha wish you'd thought of that and put that salesguy in his place! seems you put him in his place anyway, so congrats!

ah, who am i kidding, that comment would have set me off and i'd have replied, 'first, i'm going to tell your sales manager that i'm going to take my business and money somewhere that *does* negotiate, as has every car lot in existance since car lots were around. second, i'm going to do just what i said. third, i'm going to laugh all week about you losing a commission for being a jackass.' yeah, that's more like me.

and furthermore ~ wait! oh, crap, be careful! your driver door is ajar!

glad everyone was okay in the wreck. that's all that matters when it's all said and done.

[ChattyLMS]

First I have to say:
OMG!  What a terrible accident!  I'm so relieved that your wife was not hurt.  Thank God!

Now,
What a cool truck!!

[hhwolfman]

Cool truck. 

[tv horror]

First of all thank God about your wife, secondly look at all that nice paint work that you could custom into a UMA logo well done. By the way, trading is an art with us monster collectors we always get our fiend!

[Wich2]

So glad all involved are o.k., Bobby.

That's the lead story here!

-Craig

[michblk]

Glad everyone was ok.  Nice truck BTW.  I had to buy one last year, so I feel your pain brother.  I'm just thankful I'm still working and could buy one.

BK

[raycastile]

That's an awesome truck.  It probably has warp drive as a factory option.  I'm glad no one was hurt in the crash.  If I had to buy a new car now, that would kill my collecting.  In fact, I'd have to sell some stuff.

[hammett1]

Bobby, Glad your wife was not injured in the accident.  And way to deal on the truck.  Nice to have save reliable transportation (under warranty).  Preyer is absolutely right about the "retail" market place.  If the person is on commission then they do have the power to negotiate.  At the grocer I work for, we spend the better part of our day crunching numbers to see how we can get quality product from our vendors to offer quality value and savings for our customers and  still add revenue to the bottom line.  Fortunately the grocer I work for has it's own cows so our store brand is the better value (especially since we produce the milk some of our vendors buy and resell).  David

[Toy Ranch]

That's an awesome truck.  It probably has warp drive as a factory option.  I'm glad no one was hurt in the crash.  If I had to buy a new car now, that would kill my collecting.  In fact, I'd have to sell some stuff.

Yeah, that's pretty much where I'm at.  But I've had several years of no payments and collecting so I can get this paid off and back to it!  And hopefully I'll still be able to get a few things now and again.

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As far as my wife's crash...  she called me soon after it happened, and I knew she was OK right away.  Next day she had a little "working in the yard" level of soreness is all.  The way it happened, it was not really very likely anyone would have been hurt unless other vehicles got involved, which they didn't.  The force of the collision and speed was well distributed and both drivers were seatbelted, airbagged, and well away from the point of impact.  The wall her car slid into slowed them down.  It wasn't one of those "I can't believe anyone walked out of that" accidents, although you tend to think any accident at highway speed is going to result in injury, this didn't have the look of "somebody must have been hurt" to it.  Although thoughts of "this could have been bad" have flashed through my mind a few times, I don't tend to dwell on what could have happened (applies to not winning the lottery as well ). 

My thread title was tinged with irony and sarcasm.  We're very fortunate in so many ways, and I'm fully aware of the absurdity of lamenting a new truck over monster collecting, although on some level it's a genuine feeling, that's about 10 notches down the list in importance.

Preyer, I didn't take offense at the salesman's comment.  I'd been working him for hours, and vice versa.  We'd talked about his vintage camera collection, my monster collection, and much more while "waiting for the manager" etc. so we had a rapport by that time that some kidding around was not only acceptable, but expected.  Developing a rapport and feeling at ease with someone is an important thing to establish before entering any bloodbath negotiation.  I spent 5 hours running him in circles to get him time-invested in me as a customer before we even started talking about what I actually wanted to buy.  By then he was determined to make a sale and not let me walk away, and that was when I could start beating him down on price.  He'd realized what had happened by then and I'm sure inside he was saying "that mother*****".  For the first 5 hours he thought I was dim-witted and couldn't make up my mind about anything.  I'm brutal on car guys.  When my wife got her car, we ordered a car we didn't want and then refused it to get them invested in the sale.  Then my wife had Toyota salesmen calling her while we were at the dealership negotiating on the car we really did want and she kept talking about how maybe she wanted a Prius.  The salesman was about to head off for a straightjacket fitting when I pulled him aside, gave him a number, and told him we had to get it done quick, that she changes her mind all the time and it was just hell to deal with, and if it didn't happen now it probably wouldn't.  Then in the finance office, it was "gotta pick up my son at 3pm and it has to be done by then or I'm not coming back", then refusing to move off the numbers I wanted.  They turned it into a game that usually they win.  And really, making a sale is a win for them, so it's not like they lose exactly, but after a few early defeats at the car dealer, I'm their nightmare customer.  It's all friendly enough, but they don't call me back.

Oh, and I've negotiated the price of retail goods in retail stores with non-commissioned salespeople before lots of times.  Not at the grocery store, but "this pair of boots is dinged" or "what will you give me the demo for" and stuff like that all the time.