Biggest Financial/Prepping Mistake I have made in Years

 

In the late 1990's my step son swiped the keys of my Nissan while I was out of town and managed to roll it about a dozen times down a gravel road. About a week and a half after that my wife, his mother, decided she had finally found a job that appreciated untrustworthy Women enough and paid em well enough that she could now be "Independent". That is one subsidized by the government working for a public service union who only cared about her gender and not the truthfulness of her resume. YA they paid for that when she embezzled about 150K from em in short order but I digress a bit.

So I found myself going through a divorce, with a house that had been stripped bare, bank accounts emptied, about 10K in unpaid bills that were past due and an un-driveable mess of a car all during the same 2 week period. More or less.

I took my first pay check plus a bit of burrowed money from my dad and paid cash for a high mileage Ford Escort. I continued to drive that little beat up grocery mobile for my daily commute for over 20 years. 

It got the best gas mileage ever with it's little four cylinder. Once I started working at the dealership it cost me literally pennies to keep repaired. I was too old to care what anyone thought about my old clunker anyway and driving around with no car payment and liability insurance was SWEET.

In all those years I had a lot done to that car and saved literally thousands of dollars in repairs. I had some guy back right out and t-boned me then got down on his hands and knees crawling toward me in the middle of the road begging me not to call the cops for a report. Had his wife and little kid in the car, who were both crying too. No license,  No insurance, probably drunk, obviously no money and told me he had two warrants for his arrest and was taking his wife to her chemo treatment when he hit me.

I let the guy go. I caught a lot of flak for doing that. Starting with the witnesses who were standing there with me. They were all sure the guy was lying about the Chemotherapy anyway. Yet I never regretted letting him go. The car was worthless in value by then. 200+ thousand miles on it and a cheap car to begin with. I had seen this guy around the area for years as the whole thing went down only about 3 miles from the Small Hold. I drove by him everyday almost, walked by him and stood in line behind him at the local gas station etc. He offered to pay for my busted headlight and a new door which of course never happened but even so as I stood there and did a cost/benefit comparison in my head I did not see any possible benefit for making an enemy out of this guy. The cops weren't gonna care but would be glad they got credit for an arrest. No one was gonna give me any money for my old POS and I would still have to look over my shoulder every time I saw this guy. Not that he was anything to be afraid of physically but why chance a bullet in the back for nothing? If he was some stranger I might have called the cops but at the time he was too close for comfort.

Haven't seen the guy in years or his wife for that matter. Don't know where he went or care. After my Wife got her new car I turned her old one into my daily commute and finally after a few years gave the old escort away to another local guy who asked to buy it. 

If I had even an inkling that the Democrats would managed to get OBitMe in at all I never would have given that car away. That car was cheaper to drive than my wife's much newer hybrid and I wish I would have kept it.

To date giving that car away because I got tired of mowing around it is the biggest financial/prepping mistake I have ever made and I imaginably kick myself for it about every day.

Keep Prepping Everyone!!!!