Blessed by the Potato

I made it to Victoria safe and sound, and the flight, even at 5 hours, was pretty decent. I had my worries at first because there was a small baby seated across from me, and I had nightmarish visions of screaming and crying, but she was actually great and didn’t cry at all. She’d even smile when I turned over and waved.

I was starting to drag a fair bit when I got in though because I just couldn’t quite get to sleep on the plane. I completely spaced about the shuttle bus (~$15) from the airport and just grabbed a cab instead which set me back $55. In my defense, I was swayed by the fact that the cab was a bright yellow Prius. In fact, Victoria seems to be something of a hybrid mecca: virtually every cab is either a Prius or a Camry hybrid, and the ones that aren’t are Yarises (how Toyota got such a lock on the Victoria cab market I can’t really say). That is, of course, how it should be given how much of an improvement hybrids make to cab-like driving. The trip in from the airport averaged about 5.8 L/100 km. Even the “regular” cars seem to have a higher proportion of hybrids and smaller cars; hardly any SUVs at all.

I went for a nice long walk when I first got in and the weather was great. After that it was nap time. When I got up, I was surprised to see the sun still shining since they were calling for rain tonight. I went out for another walk in search of dinner, but came up empty-handed. Apparently Victoria closes at 8, even in Chinatown. I spent nearly an hour walking around trying to find an East Side Mario’s that I swear I had seen close to the hotel when I was walking around earlier, but never did find it. After checking the Yellow Pages, it looks like it doesn’t exist, which makes me wonder if I dreamed I saw and East Side Mario’s, and if I’m tireder than I think I am.

I just checked the schedule for the conference, and I don’t have anything until 6 pm tomorrow, so I’m trying to decide what to do. I found a place that rents bikes, but now my legs are hurting after over 2 hours of walking today. It also looks like the car rental place across the street has a Prius, so I might see if I can rent it and go on an extended test drive and trip up into the mountains of Vancouver Island, maybe find a beach and have a pic-nic or something. If you’ve got any suggestions, leave them quickly (I’ll be making up my mind around 12pm Ontario time).

Well, my Nokian WRs were fantastic this winter, with a huge improvement in traction over the all-seasons I was using before. I only had my wheels spin even a little just twice through the whole winter, whereas before wheelspin was at least a weekly occurrence (if only a minor split-second loss of traction at an icy stop) when the weather was particularly nasty. As spring is setting in and the warmer weather returns I’m not finding any issues with the tires being too soft or sloppy, though the real hot weather hasn’t hit yet. As I first reported, they are a bit noisier on the turns, but it doesn’t bother me at all.

In addition to recommending the tire, I’d also recommend Kal Tire, the store that I got them from. Just a few days ago, I hit a bump or pothole or something, and heard a strange bouncing ball type ringing noise from the back of the car. It didn’t happen again, so I didn’t pay it much heed… until today when I found out I had a bulge in my sidewall. Their warranty is going to take care of it, and the experience in dealing with them has been pretty good so far. They didn’t have another Nokian WR in stock in my size, and I said I had to drive to Toronto tomorrow. Rather than let me risk driving on a tire that has a compromised sidewall, they put on a used tire (which is worn down, but still legal and in good shape otherwise) free of charge to get me around until my new Nokian arrives next week. At that point, I’ll have to pay a bit for the replacement since the warranty is pro-rated and I’ve got about 6000 km on the tire now, but it should only be about $10 or so, and they’ll do the mounting for free (I believe — we’ll see for sure next week!).

Wayfare and I were talking about housing and about how it seems like any halfway decent place in Toronto is out of our reach — when we realized we weren’t quite certain what our reach was. We had some very vague ideas based on our savings and estimated income, and some rules of thumb (e.g.: you can afford a house that costs about 3 times your yearly pre-tax income). However, I didn’t think a lot of those were very realistic: what if we had a lot of debt, or liked a lavish lifestyle, or were frugal and wanted to spend more of our income on a house? Plus, as nice as some of the rules of thumb are, they seem to have been largely blown out of the water by the current housing market (which I think may be due for a flatlining or correction, but that’s a topic for another day). So to help us look at our options and lay out a few future scenarios, and also to see where all the figures and calculations were coming from, I made a spreadsheet. It was actually a rather good spreadsheet if I do say so myself, and I took the time to put a bit of formatting into it, so I decided to share it with you here.

[Note for those reading this via a feed: you may need to come to the web site proper at www.holypotato.com/?p=499 to download the excel file]
I am not a financial advisor, nor do I even own my own house. This spreadsheet will likely contain errors and is simply an attempt to share my efforts with you, don’t take it as accurate financial advice. Use it, edit it, redistribute it to your liking. Attribution is appreciated but, in this case, not required.

I am, of course, always interested when a contest open to Canadians features a Prius as the prize. A contest by the National Post is doing that right now, and it’s an essay/video contest to boot, which on the one hand should keep the number of entries fairly low, but on the other, requires merit rather than random chance. With my luck, a merit-based contest is probably a good thing, however, I can’t really think of a way that I’ve helped the environment in my local community, and certainly not one that has earned “attention and support from others.”

Anything I’m overlooking?

The heater control in my car broke last week. I was turning the heat up, and there was a loud “thunk” and then the heater knob didn’t have any resistance to it any more. Fortunately it was stuck on just a few notches up from full cold — cold enough that with the A/C on the car is livable in the sun, but warm enough that it’s not a completely ice box for these spring nights (though it is a little too chilly for good defogging). I hoped at first that the plastic knob just broke; this has happened twice before, and is a $5 part to replace. Unfortunately, that was not the case this time, and a mechanic told me that the cable that connects the control knob to the actual baffle/damper thing that controls the airflow broke. It’s a cheap part to replace, but would require 3 hours of labour to take apart the dashboard to actually get at it. He actually sent me away because he didn’t have the time to fix it, which is a bad sign.

My dad said to think about whether I want to keep the car before going out and spending more money on repairing it. (He also joked — I think it was a joke — about how convenient it was that my heater was broken, so I’d need a new car as soon as the weather started getting cooler around, say, October)

So Wayfare and I did exactly that yesterday, going through the pros and cons of replacing the car. Our target replacement vehicle would almost certainly be a new Prius for a number of reasons (including that I want one, that I want a new car at least once in my life and that my next car might be the last car I ever get as I anticipate the revival of public transit and the end of cheap oil, and finally that used Priuses are just not depreciated enough to bother with anything that isn’t new).

On the one hand, after this heater repair I’ll be closing in on $2000 of repairs done or planned for this year, and the car is only worth about $2000 — and that’s one rule-of-thumb about when to replace a car. Of course, after these repairs we hope that we’ll get another year or two of trouble-free operations. Plus all the repairs have been for relatively minor things: heater, muffler, new tires, brakes, radiator; the engine looks to still be in great shape and the transmission is holding in there. For all the issues and trouble lights, the car has never stranded us somewhere, so it still meets the bare definition of “reliable transportation” — and my fuel consumption average is around 8.5 L/100 km which is not too shabby.

Factors that would also lead us to buy sooner rather than later include the $2000 federal rebate that is, sadly (damn you, Flaherty/Harper!) going away after the 2008 model year. Two grand is nothing to sneeze at, and in fact provides a very good reason for buying now rather than trying to squeeze the last bit of value out of a $2000 car with unknown repair bills or summer roasting in store (air conditioning don’t fail me now!). We’d also save about $600/year in gas due to the lower fuel consumption of the hybrid. Interest rates are low right now, but should go lower in the next month or two as the bank/Toyota rates catch up with the Bank of Canada rates — this is still a factor that favours early switching, just for next month rather than next week. If the plan is to buy a house in 2-3 years, then it might also be beneficial to have 2-3 years of good payment history on a car (though the extra loan may work against us there… credit ratings can be so confusing).

Wayfare and I actually took a quick trip down to Competition Toyota today to have a look at one in the flesh as it were. We didn’t take one out on a test drive, and they didn’t offer, though there were a half dozen on the lot (putting to lie the reports about the supply problems right now due to the gas price spike). The salesman said just yesterday he had someone turn in my exact car as a trade-in, and that the wholesale price was $500 if I was lucky, which was a little disappointing (I know that if it comes to it we’d have to negotiate, but I thought it would start higher than that). He spent a while telling us about the difference between buying and leasing (I wanted to stop him, but just found I was too polite to butt in, and it was a slow day over there anyway), and then finished off by saying that he’d “love to sell [us] a car today, but honestly the interest rates will probably be better later in the summer.”

While we could afford it, it would not be a completely painless purchase — cars are expensive. And of course the fiscally prudent thing would be to just buy a quality used car that’s already had most of its depreciation taken off, kind of like I did 8 years ago. While that’s not quite what I desire, it is a better idea. And if we go that route, there really is no time pressure on when to do it except for when operating the current Accord becomes uneconomical. So we decided to hold off for now, which is probably the right decision. Especially since we don’t really know what the future holds: if my PhD goes poorly and I lose my scholarship funding and have to live off next-to-nothing starting 2 years from now, or if I graduate and then can’t find work then the burden of a new (or newer) car could be even more painful. Plus the Rogers contest isn’t over yet, so I might win one anyway :)