Suze, over at Obsolete Childhood has introduced a new prompt called “Answer Me This.” Suze says it’s “an alternative daily prompt” to the WordPress Daily Prompt, which she characterized as “ones that totally suck and are focused upon the young people here.
Anyway, her prompt question today is this:
Have you ever wasted a large amount of money purchasing something that later you thought was stupid? What was it?
My most beloved car ever was a 1967 silver-blue Austin-Healey 3000 Mk III. I absolutely loved that car, but it was essentially a two-seater British Roadster. I had recently been promoted to a position at work that occasionally required me to shuttle people from place to place, so my boss told me I needed to buy a car that could comfortably accommodate four people.
If I had been more business savvy at the time, I would have told him to lease me a company car and would have kept my Healey. But I was naive, needed the job, and, with a broken heart, sold my ‘67 Austin-Hraley 3000 Mk III for $2,200.
(Just as an aside, I Googled “1967 Austin-Hraley 3000 Mk III” to see what they’re worth today. Try around 80 grand. What?)
Anyway, a few years went by and I felt I was in a position to maintain my practical car and to try to recapture the feeling of having a classic British Roadster, so I bought a used 1959 Jaguar XK150 for $2,300.
It was drivable, but just barely. In the 3 years I owned it, it spent about 2 3/4 years in the shop of a self-proclaimed Jaguar mechanic who called himself “Jaguar Joe.” I probably paid Jaguar Joe more than I paid for the car in the first place, and he was never able to get it to run for more than a week or two at a time. I finally ended up just letting him keep the damn thing.
(Just as an aside, I Googled “1959 Jaguar XK 150 S Roadster” to see what they’re worth today. Try around 100+ grand. What?)
So, bottom line, between the cost to buy the Jaguar and what I paid Jaguar Joe in his unsuccessful attempts to make the vehicle road-worthy — all in my ill-fated effort to try to recapture a past feeling — buying that Jaguar was a very stupid purchase.