1999 Infinity QX4
BYO Distributor and probably needs a new drvetrain, but hey!
Do you think that cars with rent-to-own tires are worth a fuck?))

People are so dumb. Is it really just America? I've really only been to Afghanistan, and they were pretty dumb there too. But if people are this stupid everywhere... then I don't know...

i buy used tires. I put four on my altima for $190 mounted and balanced for 205/50/17

In the meantime... my daily driver requires $1000 tires. I paid $900 for the car. Trying to decide if i'm smarter than these people or not.

link to place where you got this?

Braineack just goes to whatever used tire place that is on the street corner closest to him. He seriously just keeps buying used tires instead of buying new ones. It is very funny to watch.

Honestly I'm not surprised at all by this. In fact I almost expected it.

See also: Why he still has a 1.6.

I bought a set of used bf Goodrich mud terrain's for my truck on Craigslist. I paid $80 for all 4. They were 285/70/17's. I drove on them until they wore so bad that the belt was ready to show through. Then I sold them on Craigslist for $80.

it's in falls church:

tires4lessinc.com


I still had the receipt the day I sold it...but i tossed it, I know they upped the prices a bit since then, as the two front tires on my prelude cost like $10 more each. still, I think they are around $45-55 a tire IIRC, something like that.

There's a place near me in Chantilly, but they are $65 each mounted and balanced. I had to use them as my prelude got a nail in it that was unpatchable/pluggable...cool thing was I ended up with the exact same Khumo I had on and the tread depth was almost spot on with the other side.

I think it's cuz brainy likes to try out four different brands of tire all at the same time.

They're not. There's a reason why much of Western Europe thinks we're a bunch of monkeys on this side of the pond. My specific experience is with Germany and Switzerland, and their approach to personal finance, and most other things, is about as logical as their behaviour on the highway - ie: very. I've known Swiss who didn't earn much money, but I don't think I've ever met one with debt issues. From what I understand, Scandinavia is up there as well, and I'm pretty sure Japan is, too.

Canada probably isn't quite as bad as the US, but we're mostly media-brainwashed consumer whores, too.

Developing countries are still mostly wearing dunce caps, too, although India and China are gunning for us fast, I think. Just look at the number of immigrants from those countries who are excelling in university faculties that we mostly flunk out of (I speak as a Canadian engineering flunk-out, myself).

My own experience in Germany, Holland and France mirrors this exactly, and I presume this to be true of most of western continental Europe.

Except for Greece. Fuck those lazy, worthless, good-for-nothing Greeks...

(j/k, Dimitris. :D)

For the most part, these societies are still highly cash-based. When you dine at a restaurant, buy groceries, etc., I observed that the use of cash was much more prevalent than the use of credit / debit cards. In fact, I don't recall dining in a single restaurant during a full month of dining out in Germany that would even take plastic (the fellow I was with kept trying on general principle.)

I've no idea whether A follows B, but in general, we in N.A. seem to have largely abstracted actual money from the concept of value. We tend not to actually hold it in our hands, count it out, etc., but rather just swipe a piece of plastic and look at some numbers on a screen.

I've actually been to lunch with someone who chose to pay with a 1,000 Swiss Franc bill (worth slightly more than $1,000) in a small town restaurant. The waitress' reaction: "No problem, let me get your change." At gas stations, there are signs apologizing for not accepting them (200 Franc bills are fine). Contrast this with over here, where pulling out anything larger than a $20 is cause for concern that someone be walking around with such a large sum of money.

Personally, I don't think that A follows B. I think it's more that Europeans are aware that each credit card transaction results in 2-3% of the transacted amount going into the pockets of the banks, and Europeans have no interest in giving away that money, particularly since they manage their finances well enough that they don't need the credit.

I think it's more that they do A because it makes sense, and they do B because it makes sense. We do neither, because we don't like to think, hence monthly purchase plans for toasters and tires.

I guess.

I'm going to take off my Joe Perez hat for a moment, and just be totally sincere:

We tend to use phrases like "I can't understand why..." quite liberally.

"I can't understand why a person would buy a Kia Rio," for instance. But that's not really a fair statement. If you think about it hard enough, it's quite easy to come up with a long list of reasons why a person might buy a Kia Rio. Rios are quite inexpensive, Kia is doing a good job of marketing them, they appear to have passable specs "on paper," they come with a reasonable-sounding warranty, they are styled in a fashion which evokes the popular "hot hatch" trend in Europe, and so on and so forth.


That having been said, try to appreciate the seriousness with which I make the following statement:

I literally cannot understand why a person would "rent to own" anything at all.


I can understand how you might get roped into a payday-loan scam of the sort depicted by Tekel. You just have to be bad at managing money, have no creditworthiness at all, be faced with a debt the consequences of which seem worse than taking on a loan at 10,000% interest, and believe that, for some reason, your financial situation will improve shortly after you take on the debt. (eg: you are flat broke, and the landlord is literally going to kick you, you three children, and your elderly mother out onto the street in the middle of winter, and yet you have a job lined up that starts a month from now, after which you'll be able to re-pay the load.)


But when it comes to non-durable consumer goods? I honestly don't get it. If your tires are bald, either:
A: Buy used tires,
B: Sell the car and buy something cheaper that has good tires, or
C: Get up an hour early and ride the fucking bus.

And that's the LEAST bad of them all, since we can at least PRETEND that "it's absolutely essential that I have a reliable car with decent tires."

Then I see places where you can "rent to own" a TV set, a sofa, a stainless-steel fridge, etc. And I cannot think of any possible set of circumstances under which I would think that this was a reasonable proposition.


I'll give you an example:

When I was in college, I lived off-campus for the last two years. Rode the city bus each day to and from campus. Hated the shit out of standing around waiting for the bus, packing myself into a crowded-ass bus, being dropped off in inconvenient places, etc.

I really wanted a motorcycle. With a motorcycle, you could park damn near anywhere on campus, skirt around traffic jams, etc. A motorcycle would be just great to have.

So I did a bit of belt-tightening and saved money from my minimum-wage part time job for a couple of months until I had however much it cost me to buy a used Nighthawk 250 from some random guy out of the classifieds (Think Craigslist, but on paper, for you young 'uns.), and after that, I had a motorcycle and no debt.

Now, if someone had offered me that same bike under a rent-to-own program, which allowed me to have it right away (no need to wait several months) at the cost of ultimately paying 3x what it was actually worth over a period of 2-3 years, I'd have probably laughed. Literally, I would have been so amused by this that I would have physically laughed in their face.


So how can this possibly be considered a reasonable way to acquire a flatscreen TV or a sofa?



Note to self: find out where the nearest Aarons store it and stand outside it offering membership in a new pyramid scheme to everyone go goes inside it.

Shit like this is what scares me, because it makes me think Idiocracy is becoming our real future. Durr, I need tires but can't afford them. So I'll make insane payments on them instead of just buying low mile used tires...

Holy cow: "rent to own tires" (sign rim sizes to return to normal?) - MX-5 Miata Forum


Repost from miata.net.

I see those Aarons trucks all over the place. I don't get it either. It's such a scam. Even if I was expecting to make a million dollars next week, you don't spend money you don't have if it's not an emergecy.

I'll admit at one point I didn't understand this. As a young kid I racked up a decent credit card bill, and didn't save nearly as much as I should have. I'm finally even again, and have started saving, I know it's a slippery road. But even still, I never would have considered one of those rent to own things. The interest is just retarded. At least with a decent credit card interest rates are tolerable.

From that thread I note the following:


This reminds me of a story I once heard. No idea if it's true (friend of a friend kind of thing) but it essentially involves a couple of autocrossers who decided to amuse themselves one weekend by inaugurating the Ford Taurus Cup Challenge (or something like that.) One of them went and rented a Taurus from a typical Hertz / Avis / etc sort of place (along with the LDW), and brought it to the local AutoX club's practice weekend. They then offered the use of this car to all comers, for something like a $10 a lap entry fee. The funds collected were used to pay for the rental, with the remainder going into a purse paid to the best times.

Despite rotating the tires halfway through, virtually nothing of them was left when the car was returned to the rental counter the following morning.


Having (accidentally) annihilated the front tires on my sister's Camry when she traded cars with me for a couple of months when I broke my left foot, I can believe that this was true. It is surprisingly easy to destroy high-treadwear tires just by driving on them in what I consider to be a normal fashion. I get much better life out of 140TW tires than I would out of 500TW tires.

The worst part of it is that we're willingly entrenching ourselves into having no control over our lives. If you're loaded up on debt, you can't walk away from your bank when they decide to jack interest rates or service fees. Likewise, if the company you work for decides to cut your pay or screws around with your working conditions, instead of telling them to shove it and looking for a new job, you have to take it up the ass because you can't skip one paycheck without defaulting on a car/mortgage payment. The fact that most people put themselves into this situation gives employers a lot more leverage than if people were more financially stable. The more debt we have, the less free we are.

My brother is an independent contractor in IT. Makes very respectable money, but contrary to most, is extremely conservative with it. In his mid-thirties now, the guy has always rented modest apartments relative to his income, but frankly could probably buy a decent condo in cash today, if he wanted to. Living in the city, he's almost never owned a car, excepting a short-term lease on a then-new 350Z, which I believe he paid about $15k up front into. For a lease. He just bought a 2000 mile Ducati 848 to tool around on, in cash, natch.

Anyway, being an independent contractor, he was once between jobs and was interviewing for the next one. One potential client gave him an offer that he deemed way too low, and he refused it. Client was aghast and couldn't possibly comprehend how someone with no current income could afford to do such a thing. He totally expected to be able to lowball my brother due to desperation for the next paycheck. There's a story of my father walking out of a job despite having just had twins and buying a new car, too.

Living within your means and managing your money gives you a great deal of power, and you don't necessarily have to have a fortune in order to do it. At 18, I had a boxy old Jetta. Friends mocked it, but it was always maintained to the point that I could - and did - hop in and take 1000 mile road trips in it, and I always had money for gas. I literally could have driven that car into a lake and walked away from it without it really impacting my life. Granted, I still lived with my parents at the time, but I was only making about $7,000/year.

It's all in what you set your priorities to be, but I think a lot of people would be happier if they had less stuff and more freedom.