feeling peer pressure driving my old banger

bigjl

anotheruser wrote: »

Cars have become a status symbol.
Look at city land rover drivers for that.

If it's important to YOU to have a flash car, then get one. I can think of better things I'd rather £40,000 on.

There are sometimes very good reasons for somebody living in a City to own a large expensive car like a Land Rover or Range Rover.

HNWI use Range Rovers as escape cars and as smash cars in the event of an attempted abduction. They are not a status symbol just a necessity.

Though £40k isn't really a flash car in Land Rover/Range Rover territory. Think £80/90k and you are talking something a bit tasty.

When ever I have bought a relatively expensive car it is because it was for work use (Jaguar XJL) or because I wanted it (Impreza WRX) I honestly couldn't care less about what others think. Which might explain why I now own a Berlingo Multispace and a Picanto.

bigjl

avantra wrote: »

Martin Lewis net worth is few millions more than the most of us but he drives an old Smart Fourtwo.
If peer pressure stands in your way of doing and developing your career I suggest you stay true to yourself and keep the Focus, don't forget to tell your peers as well.

I would not be surprised if he has one or two well chosen classic cars as investments plotted up somewhere.

If he lives in London he likely uses that as his urban runabout, I hate the gearbox in them it is dimwitted at best. Can see the attraction though, but the newer generation of City cars are not much larger but have four or five seats.

markelock

Worst thing I ever did was ditch a reliable old car and buy an expensive car (expensive for me). All the expensive failures that come with it, and the monthly payments too.


Now I have a couple of old cars, that each cost around the same as a single BMW issue, and feel more comfortable planning more than one holiday a year.


Having said that, my investment portfolio has primarily been made up of (magic) beans; I guess if I was a millionaire I'd have an F40, and an F1 in my country pile, but would still drive something older on a day to day basis.

fred246

Having a car gives you freedom to go anywhere. I often find that people with smart cars have lost that freedom.
"Ooh I wouldn't leave my car there overnight"
"Is my car safe to park there?"
"Ooh it could get scratched here"

Retrogamer

I had a similar feeling about 6 years ago.

I had a 1996 Peugeot 106 1.5 XN.
No electric windows
No central locking
No power steering
Manual key code immobiliser

The people i worked with had much more flash cars (all on finance) and if we used my car to go for lunch there were always tears of laughter because it was a "poverty spec" poor man's car.

The comments / peer pressure didn't bother me back then and after having much more modern cars (Ibiza FR TDi / Fabia vRS TDi) i agree they do drive much nicer and look nicer but i'd still happily go back to a Peugeot 106 any time

If your Focus is good enough and you have no gripes with it i say drive it and keep it until it becomes too expensive to maintain or repair

Teacher2

The old expression 'fur coat and no knickers' springs to mind. Do you know if your friends own or lease these fancy cars? Or whether they are perks of the job? The whole display of wealth might well be 'on tick'.

When I was teaching my manager OH and I scraped and scrimped to pay for prep schools for our children and lived like paupers to do it. The children's friends' parents seemed seriously wealthy and they were types who loved to drive high end vehicles and boast about their houses, holidays, perks, pensions and bonuses. Every so often the 'package' disappeared with a redundancy. The rich boasters with their family disappeared off the radar. They couldn't take the humiliation of being seen to fail. They couldn't keep up the payments on their houses and cars and had to decamp sharpish.

We, on the other hand, had no debt, no leases to service, no extravagances to keep up and plodded on year by year until the children entered free state grammar schools. We ran an old Ford Galaxy and, even had there been a redundancy, we'd have kept it as we had saved up for it and it was ours.

Better to be a shabby rich person than a gilded flake.

interstellaflyer

Living a rural area i can promise you the richest people don't necessarily drive flash cars, it's the keep up with the Jones's middle class. One particular couple own a private airstrip and a couple of light aircraft and until last year owned a WW2 fighter (not going in to details but one of the famous ones) they drive around in a H reg Isuzu 4 x 4

Nilrem

One of the fairly common things among the more sensible well off/rich is that they don't necessarily buy flash.
They are careful about what they spend their money on, that way they can for example if they buy a £50k car as opposed to a £20k one it means they've not got the money to invest in other things, so they might go with the cheaper one and put the other £30k to work for them in property.

It's also worth remembering that a lot of people who are "well off" and driving expensive cars are doing so on some form of lease so they can get a new one every few years to keep up appearances.

Personally for me a car is simply a means of transport, even if I was a millionaire I'd probably only get a newer version of my current car (which cost <£20k) every 5-10 years.

blink18

bigjl wrote: »

You seem to know a lot about DM since you have only been on the forum for a few months.

Have you ever noticed how people keep disappearing?

Why is that?

So that is what trolls want?

To get repeatedly kicked of forums?

Or do they want to create idiotic and banal threads that ruin the forum?

You really need to get a life.

it cant be just me that comes across your posts waffling on about darkmatter.

Seriously, turn the internets off for a week and get in to the real world.

zolakesb

If you are happy about it and it gives u the comfort you need and it takes you where you want to be on time and you do not have to kick start it in the morning and its not heavy on petrol why bother about what people think.