My $60,000 Mistake...

I was super sad about the Bronco, but, uh, you know, made up for it by, uh, pimping the dad car. Let's go. All right. I was just doing that for drama. Anyway. Hey, credit warriors. How are you doing? And welcome to the video. Now, this is a video about a mistake that I made that spurred me into a big financial decision that will have an impact on me for the next few years. It's a bit of a story video, and if you like the sound of that, subscribe if you're new and let's get going. So last year I ordered the Tesla Cybertruck like all YouTubers did. I mean, as soon as I saw that thing, I just thought YouTube content, but it looks like the Tesla Cybertruck won't come out for ages. I mean, they're saying late 2022 now, and to be honest, I don't even believe that. I think it probably will be 2023 before I receive mine. Maybe the first ones will come out in late 2022, but I think I was like number 250,000 on the list, but also last year Ford launched the new Ford Bronco, which, uh, well, it looked absolutely amazing and it looked like it would come out before the Cybertruck. So I placed an order for that as well. Like literally on the day of the launch, I sat in front of Ford's glitching website for three hours and at 11 PM, I finally had my order go through. And I ordered something pretty similar to this, except the four-door version, the same obnoxious color, uh, hard top Sasquatch package, which is the highest level of off-road capability on the Ford Bronco. And well, last week I got the call that my Ford Bronco had been built and it had been delivered to the dealer and it was ready for me to pick up. There was just one problem. Well, actually there were two problems. So the first problem was that they got it in the wrong color. Okay. Remember I wanted that obnoxious orange. Well, they ordered it in this color. It's called Area 51. And in fact, I saw a reference to an Area 51 as far back as just after I'd, you know, set the specifications with the dealer, but there was nothing to indicate that that was a color. Okay. It doesn't say Area 51 gray. It just says Area 51. And I didn't realize it until I saw the final specs sent to me by Ford when the car was already basically delivered. Second problem was that Ford, because of a shortage of hard tops, has switched my hard top order to a soft top. Now for the color, I guess I could have lived with it, or if I really hated it that much, I could have wrapped the car on that, you know, basically would have been solved. But for the soft top, you know, we've got a lot of snow here in the winter and there's no way I want my only car to be a soft top. In other words, I would have had to have kept my Jeep Grand Cherokee and had this Ford Bronco as a second car. That means that I would have to pay for and ensure two cars, which brings up the monthly cost. And also I only have a single car garage. So I would have to look at options such as building a new garage, or at least putting a carport over this parking space that I had built last year. The cost of the Bronco was $60,000. Could I afford it? Yeah. But as a financial YouTuber, I teach people about financial literacy and good financial habits. Right now, I'm not a millionaire yet. I'm only earning hundreds of thousands of dollars, like that's the ultimate first world problems thing. But anyway, the point is, while you are still building your wealth, don't make stupid frivolous purchases of depreciating assets like second cars. There's that famous clip of Jeff Bezos once he was already a billionaire, but nowhere near as rich as he is now, and he was still driving a Honda. What's with the Honda? This is a perfectly good car. Now that may be extreme, but the point is, while you are still building your wealth, try to only buy assets that appreciate like property or stocks or crypto, etc. Try to avoid things that are liabilities or things that depreciate like second cars, boats, timeshares. That last one's a joke. Never buy a timeshare. But I at least had to take it out for a test drive, and I went there kind of thinking that I might, just might, FOMO into it. So I brought my wife along to be the voice of reason. Pro tip there, if you don't really want to buy the car, bring someone along who has no interesting cars and can talk you out of it. So I drove the Bronco, and as expected, it was awesome. Couldn't take it off-road, unfortunately, but the ride was pretty similar to the Jeep Wrangler. It was spacious inside, I loved the huge screen, the 35-inch tires, and the front grille looked really cool. I left the dealer saying that I would think about it, and I went off to the Delaware River to do just that, to think it over. And it was there that I made my decision. I discussed it with my wife, I made up my mind, I called the dealer, and I turned it down. Now you may think, why didn't I just buy it and then resell it for more? These things are super in demand right now, and it is true. I probably could have made 10 grand by just buying it and reselling it on Carvana. And if I was earning, say, 50 to 60 grand a year, I would definitely do that. 10 grand would make a huge difference to my life. But to be honest, on the income level I'm at, 10 grand doesn't really matter that much. I know that might sound a little bit like condescending, but it's just the truth. And actually, I don't have 60 grand in cash right now. I'm pretty cash poor, because a lot of my money is tied up in stocks, cryptos, etc. If I was to sell any of those assets to buy the car, I would then have to pay a capital gains tax bill. That would cause a headache. So I would at least have to finance some of the purchase, which would open up another line of credit on my credit report. I would also have to wait for the car's title for like six weeks or something before I could sell it. So the whole thing would bring a lot of hassle to me just for 10 grand. And it would also interfere with my construction loan, which is like literally ready to close like maybe this week or next week. And that would put that whole thing at risk. And that loan is for a $300,000 property that is an appreciating asset. It is far more important for my financial future than some car, which is basically a toy at this stage. So I decided to let it go. I called the dealer and he said that it would probably be sold by the end of the day. So he really didn't care and he probably sold it at a huge markup and made a fat profit on it. So good for him. But since I got so excited about the Bronco, I had to do something. I had to get in a bit of off-road action to make up for losing that awesome car. So I decided to pimp the dad car. Yes, that's right. I was going to mod the Jeep Grand Cherokee, which despite most people using them to drop their kids off at school, does actually have some pretty good off-road capability. Just search on YouTube. You'll find a lot of videos of people taking them into some pretty extreme situations. Now first I thought about getting a lift, but a lot of people say that the Rough Country lift kit, which is the most common one for the Jeep Grand Cherokee and the most affordable, isn't that good. So in the end, I decided to first of all, just go with some really aggressive tires and think about lift kits and stuff later. So I decided to go for these, the Goodyear Wrangler Duratrac. Now you guys know me. On any big purchase, and this was a $1,000 purchase, I always like to double or triple dip on the deals and I was actually able to triple dip on credit card rewards on the purchase of these tires. And guys, if you like stacking rewards, a great app to use is Max Rewards. The gold version of Max Rewards will activate your Amex offers for you so that you never miss a deal. You may even buy something and get home and find an email saying you've saved 50 bucks or something. It has happened to me. The app also has a load of free features as well. It will show you which card to use where to get the best rate of points or cash back. It also has sections that list all the benefits of the card, like which cards have dining credits, which cards have lounge access, so you can optimize your wallet and cancel cards that have overlapping benefits, for example. If you want a free month of Max Rewards gold, you can get that with my link below, or you can just download the app and check out the free features of which there are many. So anyway, here's what I did. I found a 15% off coupon for Goodyear on the internet, which I used and it worked. I saved $50 by using an Amex offer for Goodyear, which was already added to my card automatically by Max Rewards. That was spend $250, get $50 back. And because I used the Amex platinum, I earned a thousand points on the card as well. So in the end, I had about a $200 discount and I'd earned a thousand Amex points. Now let's check out the results. All right. So we're on a cool off-road track. We're going to check out the new tires. I was super sad about the Bronco, but, uh, you know, made up for it by, uh, pimping the dad car. Let's go. So guys, I think the moral of this story is while you are building your wealth, be careful about buying depreciating liabilities, such as second cars. That's $60,000 invested in stocks and cryptos will easily be $100,000 by next year. Whereas if I bought the Bronco, it would be a depreciating liability, even though I probably could sell it for more in the very short term, in the longer term, it will depreciate and it will cost money to insure and maintain. Any car people watching this video, let me know what you think I should do to the Jeep. It's a 2017 Jeep Grand Cherokee. If there are any lift kits that you think are good, leave them in the comments. Maybe I should increase the tire size, probably have to get a lift first to do that. So it fits or anything else, maybe put a bar on the front so that if I hit deer, it won't damage the car anyway, or perhaps I should just trade it in for a Wrangler. Leave your comments below. I'd love to hear what you think. Please subscribe if you're new guys. And remember, if you subscribe to this channel, it's not really a car channel. It's more of a financial channel. So just throwing that out there. All right, guys, thanks a lot for watching and we'll see you next time. Bye bye.