Us Car Repossessions Surge as More Americans Default on Auto Loans

I have also lost days waiting for tire shops and alignment...as those are the only 2 things I don't do myself.

You wanna take used half worn tires and put it on bent rims and make it come out ok, you need a digital balancer to make that not suck.

You know you can just break the rules when it comes to petty stuff like that, right? If you're not being unreasonable or thumbing your nose at them they typically don't come after you.

>and every lease I’ve signed has prohibited me from repairing my cars on apartment grounds.

This is a direct result of the clean water act and knock on laws.

The clean water act mandates stormwater management. The solution needs to be maintained in perpetuity. The HOA is the entity saddled with this. There's various engineering calculations that go into pollutant load which impacts the size of the stormwater bullshit engineered ponds you need. In order to make the solution they are forced to build cheaper, the developer puts "no wrenching" (and a bunch of other things) in the initial HOA covenant.

The city ordinances are mostly the same. They're putting that shit in their so that the engineering numbers are better and their stormwater stuff can be cheaper.

That's not to say the snooty jerks don't like those rules for their own sake.

When I lived in New York I did have a commute where transit was faster than driving. But it was like Mad Men—I went from my fancy high rise right next to the train station to my fancy law firm right next to another train station. That was a lovely commute, even compared to driving in the suburbs. But most people in New York (or Tokyo) cannot afford to live so close to popular transit lines.

> With that in mind I find the argumentation that poor people have a worse time to be disingenuous- owning a car is the second largest expense most people have.

That’s what we call “penny wise and pound foolish.” Cars is capital equipment, and get handed down through families. Like any capital equipment, they depreciate and require maintenance. But they also enable people to earn money. I have relatively poor in laws: my wife’s grandmother raised four kids as a waitress, and her husband did hunting and odd jobs. Cars, which they carefully pass down through families, enable them to move around for better jobs and housing. When my father in law lost his job, he moved in with his mom and found various jobs in a 60 mile radius. If you look at the places in the U.S. with good transit, the poor there are structurally poor. They can’t just go to where the jobs are—they are stuck going to where the train lines go. It becomes a trap that creates generational poverty.

That is interesting. I should explain that I edited out the part of my comment about language (because it is not relevant to my point).

I haven't been to Malmo, but I doubt that visiting a place for a short time tells a person much about what it is like to live and work there. I've read hundreds of comments from people who have lived and worked in both the US and Europe. I believe that life in Europe tends to be more orderly and pleasant than life in the US. A good example of "more orderly" is that deaths from automobile accidents are several times higher in the US than they are in most places in Europe -- and not just because Americans spend more time in cars: in the US, deaths per mile of travel in automobiles are several times higher.

>Why would you rather live in Orlando?

Because income is a massive factor in quality of life, and for any level of income, it is significantly easier to earn that level of income in the US than in Europe provided that the person in question is healthy enough to hold a job.

https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter8/urban-trans...

I just google imaged it and all the graphs say about the same thing.

And it’s one thing if your car breaks down on a side street, it’s completely different if it breaks down on an interstate. If you have a daughter would you be comfortable with her driving an unreliable car? Your wife? Your mother?

I’ve only had new car fever once. When I was 25 and bought my second car - a Mustang in 1999. I drove my Mercury Tracer that my parents bought me in 1991 as a junior in high school.

But that car was wrecked in 2008. I gave my next car - a Honda Civic - to my step son in 2014 and my next car after that - a 2012 Chevy Sonic bought slightly used from CarMax in 2020 when I started working remotely and we went down to one car.

But I would still much rather by a cheap newish car that I don’t have to worry about than a beater that might put me down or more importantly my wife.

> Now I understand that mortgagees are non-callable.

How are you defining non-callable? If you stop paying on your mortgage that sent will eventually be called and you will be kicked out.

> If you put 20% down that removes a lot of risk of being underwater

That removes the risk of being underwater for any market correction sub-20%. Real estate prices in any areas have grown more than that ovwr the last few years, the risk of a 20%+ correction is on the table.

> With a 30 year mortgage you can get a smaller payment

And a 40 year loan would be even smaller. Where do we draw the line, and why? 30 year loans weren't always the norm, you don't have to go too far back to find an average mortgage on 10 or 15 year loans.

> When you're older you're earning more, might be an empty nester, and inflation has made each payment easier.

Income doesn't always move up, and inflation only makes payment easier if you (a) secured a fixed rate loan and (b) stay in the same home long term.

> By not rushing to pay off low interest debt you've effectively transferred money from 50 year old you to 30 year old you.

Or if it doesn't work out, 30 year old you has a home at the expense of 35 year old you.

> If you stayed employed

That's a big if, and you not only need to stay employed, you need wages to at least keep up with true inflation. Your 401k won't matter until you are at an age where you can withdraw, or we have another pandemic-style response where we allow people to cash in 401ks without the early withdrawal fees.

There's a reason much of the older generation of Viet military and political leadership studied in Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany, BSSR, and RSFSR and why both the Vietnamese Army and the MPS still send their officers and leadership track personnel to train in Belarus and Russia to this day.

Heck, Russian is still an fairly popular language choice for Viet students targeting civil service or police careers.

Furthermore, a ragtag army of farmers would not have been able to fight against the PLA in 1979 or overthrow the PRC's lackeys and backed by the US in Cambodia and Laos in the 1980s-1990s.

It's also why you find so many Vietnamese in Prague, Warsaw, East Germany, Minsk, and Moscow to this day.

The fiction of "illiterate paddy farmers pushed American soldiers out" is just a salve around the reality that the US abandoned South Vietnam in order to seal the US-China deal in the early 70s that helped contain the USSR in the late 20th century.

Both of these are historical anomalies; the middle class developed prior to their ever having been implemented.

The truth is, the currency markets are roughly where they were about a year ago, with the exception of EUR, but thats a special case which I think is a symbol if a misstep by the ECB.

It's why you see Lagarde calling for a reserve EUR; it's the only way to export EUR at this point. But that's a topic for another time.