Just to start with an update on last week’s treatise on the difference between Us and Them, here’s something that showed up in the news. The “economic recovery”, AKA: the stock market rally, has benefited the few among us who have their wealth in stocks, AKA (in this case): the 7%. This wealthiest fraction of Americans have seen their average net worth increase by about $690,000 – or 28% – during the period 2009-2011, AKA: two years. The rest, AKA: possibly you, have watched as their average net worth has dropped $6,000 during the same period.

I’m just sayin’. It really doesn’t affect me as all my worth could fit into a net, that I could tie on a pole, and go truckin’ on down the road.

Cute segue, huh?

The genesis of my next Disaster in the Making occurred about a year ago when, exasperated by the relentless advances of the weeds, I decided to buy some straw to use for mulch. The straw purchases increased in size and frequency, what with the chickens and more weeds and such, but looking back, it all started with that first bale…

“What’s that?” I heard as I pulled into the carport.

“Which what?”

“That which.” An accusatory finger pointed to the trunk.

“That’s a bale of straw.”

“In a Camry?”

I checked the badge on the back of the car.

“Yup.”

I’m not sure if I heard an actual moan or merely the sound that eyeballs make if they roll too far back in one’s head.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’ll vacuum right up.”

Five seconds later the bale was out of the trunk and a mere hour after that the trunk was again free of straw.

I went inside.

“You need a truck.”

I pointed to my net tied to the pole and shrugged.

The scene above was reenacted a number of times since but always with the same dynamic and conclusion.

I need a truck.

But if I sat down and worked the numbers it just didn’t make sense to go out and buy a truck. Sure we would save the delivery fees. We would save having to buy five-yards of cow poop when we only needed one. We would save having to vacuum the Camry – correction: I would save. Plus, what’s a micro-farm without a truck. But, when I figured out all the savings – both real and existential, it just wasn’t enough to justify buying a truck. Heck, it was barely enough to justify paying for insurance and gas.

Click!

This epiphany floored me. If I could rationalize the purchase of a truck solely by its ability to cover the operating expenses, then all I needed – other than the money part of the equation – was to find a vehicle which, through no fault of its own, would always be worth what I spent for it. Given the current rate of interest paid on investments it wouldn’t matter if I kept my money tied up in my net, tied up in a bank or tied up in a truck, I’d earn about the same, AKA: zip. But the truck would have the upside in that somebody in a Mercedes could T-bone me and I could settle for a couple of million from the insurance.

I’d like to see that happen in a bank.

Off I went, as I am wont to do, on a research expedition. As many of you might remember my last vehicular purchase was the Dodge van that moved me and my little pile of stuff out here from the east coast a couple of years ago. I was able to justify that purchase when my research showed I would be able to sell the van and trailer in Seattle for more than I paid for them back east; a result that I realized.

Armed with the confidence of experience, I set off to learn about trucks. Particularly very, very cheap trucks.

There comes a point in a vehicle’s life when all value has gone from it with the exception of its worth as a block of steel. It may drive just fine. It may have a clean interior. It may have an engine that purrs like a kitten. Forget all that. With a weight – I’m guessing – of 8,000 pounds and scrap steel selling for $400/ton, the truck is worth sixteen-hundred bucks. This point seems to occur at twenty-four years of age. A 1990 Ford F-250 might be upwards of $3,000; a 1989: $1,600.

Perfect.

Then, once the truck reaches about thirty years old the prices started back up again due to their value in parts or as restoration projects. Indeed, craigslist showed any number of “vintage trucks” – some of which having actual Douglas firs of impressive girth growing out through the cab – at five grand or more.

The “which truck should I get” decision was actually pretty easy. Any GM product was automatically removed from consideration. When GM held the Feds hostage with their threat to fire 40,000 workers, the government bailed them out and allowed them to shut down GM and then start right back up again – as GM. The skids for this shotgun-bankruptcy were greased with the people to whom GM owed money and by its small stockholders of which I was one. So screw them. I enjoyed my cross-country trip in my Dodge RAM van but I think driving a second truck with the word RAM on the rear end might be pushing my luck. Besides, I was never really a Dodge guy. The Japanese trucks of that era all, for some reason, needed new engines.

Which left me with Ford.

The next step was figuring out how to pay for my new Ford. My budget, thanks to the scrap commodity market, had been pegged. I had nothing to show for my life’s work other than a net and a pole, so I untied the net and looked inside. There were a few “valuable” items in the bag: old Zippo lighters that don’t work, old watches that don’t work, some ancestral teeth and bones; the kind of grab-bag collection that everybody carries around with them.

Then there was my “retirement plan.” My “retirement plan”, while consisting of actual money, is diminutive enough to – when I read the Why You Need Three Million Dollars to Retire On articles – make me weep. If I figure a typical life expectancy that would be fully funded by three megabucks and compare my “plan” with that; mine taps out at about eleven minutes.

But you know how I am about plans anyway.

Nevertheless, if I could access the resources in my “plan” I had enough to buy a truck at scrap value. But I couldn’t: “Under Penalty of Law.” So, just for grins, I laid out all my “valuables” on the snack table and checked them one-by-one against the IRS’ retirement plan rules. 

Son-of-a-bitch! The IRS will let me have “that” in my plan? (What “that” is shall remain redacted lest I tempt you into trying a similar scam.)

Sure enough – despite having a list of caveats as long as my arm – my “that” was perfectly allowable under the Rules of the Tax Code (thank you Republicans) as long as I could find a banking institution willing to do something stupid. (I’ll wait while the chuckling subsides.)

What I was able to do was snitch some money out of my legally verboten safety net and use it to “buy” the “that” I already owned and put “that” in a stupid bank and, thus, into my “retirement plan.” I ended up with the scrap value of a Ford truck in my pocket, and my “that” in my “retirement plan” along with nothing else.

Which was how we found ourselves in the tidy, lace-trimmed residence of Reggie and Betty Lou up in Sequim, Washington. If you stacked Reggie and Betty Lou on top of each other you could look the one on top right in the eye. They appeared to be old enough to have been to Roosevelt’s – the first one – inauguration. But both of them looked like they had just come from the cleaners and, when we arrived, both were sitting on lace-trimmed chairs reading their Bibles. No, really.

Reggie, however, was a shrewd negotiator and had the word “Nope” honed to a fine edge as he cut through my pitiful offers for his 1989 Ford F-250, Super Heavy Duty pickup with power windows and doors, a reasonably nice interior, almost no rust, and good tires all wrapped around a 460 cubic inch V-8 engine that made as much noise as a sewing machine.

Until you stepped on the pedal and burned through gasoline at the rate of a gallon every six miles.

Now, exactly one-thousand six-hundred dollars poorer (except not really) this beast sits out front of the micro-farm waiting to haul anything of up to and including the weight of the Great Pyramid at Giza.

I do think I might splurge and get a vanity license plate. I was thinking about “MCROFRM” or “CHKNBEES” or “MADVALY” but finally settled on:

“CFTPRNT”.

Appropriate, don’t you think?