How can I buy a Range Rover carrying CC debt? Not even wrong

The cynical bastard Wolfgang Pauli said of a particularly rubbish academic paper that it was so off

its not even wrong

And that can be applied to the Torygraph’s latest personal finance seeker of wisdom/AI clickbait¹, opening with I’m 52 with £13k of credit card debt — how can I buy a Range Rover?

From a twenty or thirty year old, that’s a fair question, though the answer is still the same. You can’t. With the rare exception that buying this Range Rover will return you the capital cost within a year by enabling you to work, or work more, or showcase it on your influencer channel earning loadsamoney. For a 52 year old, it implies you haven’t used your time well in educating yourself about the way of the world², and that’s bad – at least in the case of the young’uns they can say they didn’t know and were ill-prepared for the rapacious power of advertising inserting it’s blood funnel into anything smelling of money. It’s not just Goldman Sachs. It’s capitalism as a whole – like all concentrated forms of energy, it must be handled with care. That takes time to learn.

It’s the juxtaposition of CC debt and the Range Rover which is the epic fail in this 52-year old with no savings or pension. The two wealth managers make all the right noises about savings plans and stuff, but nobody asked the fundamental question. Can this fire be put out, given the questions being asked are of the ‘not even wrong’ sort. Range Rover? Holidays for the kids? There’s the genteel reserved Brit version of what’s wrong here, or the brash American version. Boils down to the same thing. Owe debt on a credit card you are paying interest on? STOP BUYING WANTS FFS. There’s the mustelid flowchart from way back which gives you a handy map in times of weakness

buy-it-or-not flowchart

How come you have got to the ripe old age of 52 spending so incontinently? As for all the motherhood and apple pie claptrap about wanting to spend shitloads on her teenage kids, well, yes, but perhaps you can do something more fundamental for their future happiness and get a grip. I know that the wishful thinking of Rhonda Byrne’s ‘The Secret’ is a great story – ask and you will receive, or you gets what you wants if you wants it hard enough.

Look what happened to many of The Secret’s readers – hosed in the GFC³ flipping houses using Other People’s Money, which is great until it isn’t. Listen to yourself

“I like to spend money on my kids. I grew up thinking money doesn’t grow on trees, and that it’s hard to come by. It’s part of the reason I sometimes struggle with money.

Put the fire out first. My parents summed this up well enough:

Don’t buy shit you can’t afford, son. Save up for it first. There are only two possible exceptions to that in life. Your education and your house, one day.

Did I live that? No. I bought a preamplifier for three month’s gross salary with an interest free loan in my first year of work. But I paid it off in the six months allotted, because I was living at home, and I learned something useful that way, as Mark Twain related the acquisition of empirical knowledge of a feline nature

A person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was getting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn’t ever going to grow dim or doubtful

It’s the tragedy of parenting. You cannot forestall the folly of the fruit of your loins. But you can shorten the recovery time by arming them with a roadmap of the way out, just never say I told you so 😉