The instrument panel is the part in front of the driver that shows important information like speed and controls for things like the radio and air conditioning.
A backup camera is a small camera on the back of a car that helps you see what's behind you when you back up. Many places require cars to have this to keep people safe.
Low profile tires are tires with shorter sides. They make the car feel more connected to the road but can make the ride bumpier and can get damaged easier.
When you buy a car and pay for it over 7 years, that's called financing for 84 months. It makes monthly payments smaller but can cost more in the long run.
The window sticker is a paper stuck to a new car's window that shows what features and options the car has and how much it costs. It helps you know exactly what your car came with.
When you buy a used car, you want to make sure it is in good shape and worth the money. This means looking at how it was taken care of and checking for any problems.
LIVE
Hey folks, welcome back to another edition of My Car Guru where I feel obligated to
update you on something several episodes ago, I mentioned, well, it's probably 10, 15 episodes
ago.
I mentioned that I was going to utilize a drug-induced weight loss scheme and it worked to a degree.
I just got off of it.
So it started with Ozympic.
My doctor gave me a trial that he had in his office.
He said, well, try this.
See what you think.
I think it was .025 milligrams and it worked its way up to .05 milliliters.
I don't know.
I get confused.
It was five shots in my gut and so I did it and I lost about eight pounds and then I
went on a cruise and I gained seven of it back.
So at that point, it's a failure.
It's self-induced failure and then I decided, okay, I'm going to go back on it.
So I called my doctor and he said, I'm going to change you two from Ozympic to Wigovi.
And I said, well, what's the difference?
He said, not much, really nothing.
And you go through this pharmacy, Novacare pharmacy, I think it's called, and you order
it and they deliver it to you.
And so that was at .05 milliliters.
And so I gave myself those shots.
Well, on about the, I would say after the third shot, there's five of them.
After the third one, I started having this pain on my right hand side, like right underneath
my ribs and towards the front.
And I asked my buddy, chat GPT, what could that be?
And he said, it could be your gallbladder.
And so I called my doctor and I said, I need to get checked.
He said, well, come on in.
So he checked.
He pushed around on me and all that.
I said, doc, let me ask you a question.
Do I really need to be doing this?
And he said, probably not.
I said, well, why didn't you tell me that from the beginning?
I don't know, but I probably should have.
Gee, thanks.
Now I've destroyed my gallbladder.
So I had already ordered another five doses from Novacare pharmacy.
And the day after I decided not to do it anymore, it arrived and they ship it in this
big box.
Well, I say big, it's about a foot square.
Okay.
And you open it up and there's a little styrofoam cooler in it.
And you open that up and down there with is a little ice pack and your syringes.
And I said, well, I'm not going to open this pack up.
So I left it all sealed up, went to my doctor's office and I said, I don't care what you do
with these, just take my name off of them.
He said, we'll get rid of them for you because I don't think you can, maybe a doctor can
give somebody else's prescription to somebody else, but it's not my problem now because
my name's not on the box.
I hope I don't get arrested for saying this.
No, he said he would dispose of them.
I just didn't feel good.
Get rid of them.
I mean, they cost me $199 for each five pack.
So what I recommend this to you, yes, if you are morbidly obese or if you are just way
overweight, your BMI is really way too high, then you'll lose weight.
And it's really pain free.
I mean, what it did for me, of course, I, okay, I'm six, three.
I weigh about, well, right now I weigh about 222 and when I started, I was 234, so it was
effective, but I really should weigh about 205 according to the scales and all that.
But I would look like a POW if I weighed that little.
So I asked my doctor, I said, what should I do?
He said, diet and exercise, do it the old fashioned way.
But if you were really behind the eight ball, then I would, I'd recommend it because it's,
it's not going to hurt you unless, but if you sense some pain in your right hand side, then
it is probably something you ought to check out.
I've got to have an ultrasound now to see what's going on there.
Make sure I don't have a gallstone.
That just sounds gross, doesn't it?
Gallstone, but yeah, it doesn't hurt real bad.
But so taking the medicine was, it did reduce my appetite.
Not a lot, but it did some.
I got full quicker where I'd normally eat the whole salad and want some extra chips to go with it.
Now I was eating half the salad and I was completely satisfied.
So I guess that's how you lose weight.
So anyway, that's an update.
I was proud to be your guinea pig and I hope this helps somebody.
I'll be back in just one minute.
Okay, I am back.
You know, one of the most important lessons a young person can learn in life and typically
they don't learn this until they get older, until they've made a few mistakes, until they've barged
into a few deals or bought something that's way out of their way over their head.
And then they learn the hard way, which is sometimes the best way to learn.
I've learned quite a few hard ways, but know this skill that everybody needs to know
and you learn through experience is learning when to fall back and punt.
It is a football analogy, so I apologize.
Know when it's fourth down and 12 yards to go, in some cases one yard to go,
depending on how hard the previous yards were to earn.
Yeah, it's time to punt, give it to the other team, get better field position.
This is what we need to do when we're making financial decisions,
like buying a car, buying property, moving up, buying a new house, even going on vacation,
if it stretches you to the limit and you can't afford it.
Some people say, heck with it, I'm going.
You know, famous last words of a redneck, watch this.
Or for you folks who aren't from around here, watch this.
I've got some folks right now that have been thinking about making a, well,
it's probably going to be a $50,000, $60,000 vehicle purchase.
New Ford, I won't say what it is.
They've been thinking about it for about a week and I haven't bothered them.
Wouldn't that be great to be able to go into a car dealership and look at a vehicle and
walk away and not be bothered?
You know, if you leave them your cell phone number and your email address, you're doomed.
You are going to be harassed.
You know, that's one tip that I give to new car shoppers, use car shoppers.
Don't give them your cell phone number.
Don't give them your email address.
If you can, put masking tape over your tag.
In some states, I guess you can call the registration office or look it up somehow and
get the name and address of the people who own that car that just left.
If, if you're like a lot of salespeople when you forget names.
So it's great that these people have taken time to think about a $50,000 to $60,000 purchase.
When you think about it in that context, then you're more likely to ponder it a little bit.
You know, if you think of it just, well, you know, honey, we're just going from,
from $450 a month to $550 a month.
Surely we can handle that extra $100 a month.
Of course, they don't take into account the extra cost of insurance,
the extra cost of gasoline.
Maybe it doesn't get quite the fuel economy that the previous car did.
These are all important considerations and worth thinking about.
And sometimes when you finally get to the end of the thought process,
when your logical mind overcomes the pull of your emotional mind,
then you realize we need to fall back and punt.
I just bought some property.
I sold it three years ago to my daughter and her husband.
And they live out in the country.
They want to move to the city.
And I had this acreage that they loved.
And I sold it to them for what I paid for it.
Wasn't that nice?
And I loaned them the money to buy it.
And so they paid me interest this whole time.
And finally one day, well, this, I guess it was last week,
my daughter comes in and said, Dad,
we're never going to be able to build a house there.
And I said, well, don't say that.
I mean, at some point you will, but not in the near future,
not even probably in the next five to 10 years.
We don't need to keep that property, keep paying interest on it.
I said, honey, so what are you trying to tell me?
She said, I'm going to punt.
She's heard me say that before.
I said, well, punt it to me.
I'll just buy it back.
And I'll pay a little bit of profit
so you can overcome some of the interest that you've paid.
And she was very happy about that.
But folks, teach your kids how to punt and know when to.
Because I really believe that their young minds don't mature as quickly as ours did.
Am I biased about that?
Do you feel that same way?
I got married at 21 and my wife was 21.
And but we had been dating since she was 15 and I was 16.
I was writing checks as soon as I got out of high school.
I had to keep a budget.
I had to report to my parents my spending habits.
I had to keep every receipt.
My dad made me turn in all of my receipts to his his office manager
and she would add them up and give him a copy of it.
He just wanted to make sure I wasn't spending too much.
And I wasn't.
I was too afraid to.
If I got money like for Christmas or my birthday, then that was mine to spend.
But everything else had to be accounted for.
That taught me some valuable lessons.
I mean, I became a Scrooge when it came to money spending.
My wife had a while to get used to me.
She said, you've changed.
I said, well, yeah, I've changed a little bit.
And, you know, that's necessary.
But when you look at a lot of young people today, it is a totally different mentality.
And I'm seeing 40 and 45 year olds that don't have anything.
They don't think about retirement.
Retirement's only what, 20, 25 years away?
And they've got nothing.
No 401k.
They're not saving anything.
They're not building any assets to speak of.
They're just blowing and going through the money and through their parents' money.
I mean, it's pretty sad when you have a 50 year old come in to buy a car.
And his 80 year old mother has to co-sign for him.
This happened.
This happened at Gateway Ford on a used car.
80 year old mother co-signing for a 50 year old child who still lives in the house.
I know people's lives get off track.
You know, things happen.
People get sick.
There's justifications sometimes.
But you know, I don't see a lot of them.
I just see irresponsibility.
I see people who needed to punt their kids out of the house and some of the attitudes
that I've seen of teenagers and people in their early 20s when their parents are bringing
them in to buy a car.
I wanted to punt them out of the dealership.
I really did.
I mean, just the lack of gratitude.
It was just unbelievable.
I'm venting.
I'm sorry.
Well, I'm really not.
You know, one of the things that I learned really early was when I was in the Boy Scouts
and I learned their creed.
I think they call it the creed.
A scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient,
cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.
Those are some pretty darn good values to have.
And one of those values is being thrifty.
And that doesn't mean to waste money.
It means to use money to your benefit as a tool and respect what it has the power to do for you.
But only if you respect it and manage it.
And just like you manage a relationship with somebody that you love,
you manage your house, your property, you know, you take care of things, at least you're supposed to.
You know, if I see somebody that brings their car in here to the dealership and
it's just all completely ragged out.
I mean, I know that they have good jobs and so forth.
I've seen it hundreds and hundreds of times, but they don't take care of anything.
And I'm pretty sure that they never have any money either.
They don't take care of that either.
Very rarely are you going to see somebody that's really diligent
with money have a sloppy lifestyle.
Would you agree with that?
Whoops, still venting.
Okay, I'm going to stop venting and let's talk about cars here in just a second.
I was reading the automotive news, which is actually a magazine that I get every week.
And it's talking about the manufacturers of automobiles are looking for ways to reduce
vehicle cost, what options and accessories that they may be willing to
delete off of vehicles in order to bring down the cost.
Now, I told the story of Lexus and what Ford is trying to copy that Lexus has done very successfully
and that's reducing the number of parts that go into a vehicle.
I mean, folks, if you were to come to the dealership and just take a little tour in my shop
and if you were to see an instrument panel, you know, the part that you can see
that the gauges, the speedometer, tachometer, the radio, the air conditioning controls,
the glove box, if you were to see what's behind that, you would be shocked.
Absolutely shocked.
You would wonder how anybody could design such a thing.
Same thing with the engine.
I had a technician that had an engine out of, it was a three cylinder engine out of
an older Nissan Rogue and he had it all disassembled.
I wish you could have seen that.
If you saw that, you would say, oh gosh, I've got to buy an extended warranty.
I have got to get some extra coverage because that stuff is expensive and you'd be right.
I tell you, one thing that has really driven up the cost of vehicles and I think totally
unnecessarily, cameras, what do we need cameras for?
You know, they're trying to get us or really push us toward the self-driving car.
I don't need that.
Do you need a self-driving car?
Some of you may be saying yes.
I don't.
I think the elderly might, you know, when they get to the point where they can't drive it,
it'd be nice to have a car that can drive itself.
But I would buy a car that had no backup camera.
The government mandates that.
This start, stop, nonsense on cars.
We don't need that.
I really don't need automatic climate control.
I can adjust a fan speed.
Remember how cars used to have a fan switch?
It had a little sliding bar there that you slid if you want it warmer or colder.
And it had an air conditioning button and a defrost button.
And I believe that's about it.
I could live with that.
Reduce the cost of the car by a thousand dollars.
Get rid of all the cameras.
I like airbags.
I like analog brakes.
Those will save people's lives.
Those are important things.
Do I need heated seats?
I didn't use to.
Boy, I need them now and a heated steering wheel.
No, really.
Come on.
I could live without that.
I could buy some lambs wool like a lot of people used to do.
You remember when everybody put lambs wool seat covers on their vehicles?
You may be too young to remember that.
Lambs wool used to be big.
I tell you what else I don't need.
20 inch wheels or bigger.
I mean, they look okay.
Fine.
I liked it better when they had 18 inch wheels because the car's road
better.
You had more tire to absorb road bumps and things.
That's gotten out of hand.
Another downside of these big wheels and low profile tires is that everybody
comes in here to trade their car.
They have wheel damage because now, well, young people call them rims.
I call them wheels.
They extend out further than the edge of the tire.
People are hitting curbs all the time and they bring their car in to trade them
and we have to deduct hundreds of dollars because of all the wheel damage.
We don't need that.
We sold an F, what was that?
F450, which is a super duty Ford truck.
Crew cab, dual rear wheels.
It was a King Ranch edition, which is loaded.
Some people need that.
It was $115,000.
Now, I remember when trucks hit $20,000 and I looked at my dad and I said,
Dad, how are we ever going to sell trucks anymore to these farmers in Green
County when they cost over $20,000?
Well, we did it and it's just kept going from there.
Now trucks are passenger cars.
Trucks are vehicles that people travel in like me.
I've got the world's biggest trunk.
I just put a bed cover on the top of my bed and we love to travel in my
truck, so it's changed.
But along with that, they've had to cram more and more technology into vehicles
and that's what's driving up the cost.
So what's going to happen is the manufacturers are going to start
decontenting vehicles.
They're going to have to in order to be able to keep them affordable.
Ford is getting ready to introduce four new vehicles under $40,000
and I know that price seems really high, it does to me too,
but that's what they're shooting for.
Vehicles under $40,000.
So all that's supposed to happen sometime between now and 2028
because right now people are financing cars for 84 months or longer.
Now the bright side is that used car values are high.
So as the price of new vehicles increases, the value of what's sitting in your
driveway increases as well.
It's so important to maximize the value that you get for your trade-in.
If you're not aware of what your trade-in is worth before you go car shopping,
you're making a big mistake.
That's why you need to send me at no charge your 17-digit VIN number.
I don't care where you live.
Well, I might not be able to help you if you live in Lithuania.
I'm not sure what Lottas are trading for right now,
but if you live in the United States, I can definitely help you.
Send me your 17-digit VIN, the mileage on your vehicle,
how it's equipped, what packages does it have on it.
If you have a copy of the original Windows sticker, which you should,
fold it up in your glove box, then send that as well.
And I'll tell you what your vehicle is worth.
I'll tell you what I would pay for it.
And then when you go shopping for a new vehicle,
you know whether you're being ripped off on your trade-in.
Just send it to me.
423-552-2020 is my personal cell phone number.
Text it to me.
And while you're at it, send me your email address and I'll send you a copy of the
VIN here in just a second.
Okay, my car guru guidebook, 32 pages of automotive brilliance.
It will help you in just about any endeavor when it comes to your car life,
as far as buying, selling, trading, servicing, picking a body shop.
You know, if you're thinking about buying a used car,
what do you really need to look for?
What are the steps that you need to go through
before you even think about talking price?
Historical information, mechanical repairs, anything that's been done to that vehicle.
How do you uncover those things?
The guidebook will help you do that.
And it's free, 423-552-2020.
Send me your email address.
If you don't have email and you're still using a flip phone,
call my dealership, Gateway Ford or Gateway Nissan, 423-639-5151.
And just tell that nice operator,
hey, I want to copy you the guidebook, please.
They know what you're asking for.
She'll get your address and I'll mail it to you.
How's that?
Well, thanks for listening to this edition of my car guru.
Like I say, if you have any questions, send me an email.
Lenny Lawson, 2020 at gmail.com or 423-552-2020.
And I'll see you next time.
About this episode
The host shares a personal update on using weight loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy, detailing initial success, side effects including gallbladder pain, and ultimately discontinuing the treatment. He emphasizes the importance of traditional diet and exercise for sustainable weight loss. The conversation then shifts to financial wisdom, specifically knowing when to 'punt' or walk away from tough decisions like expensive car or property purchases. The host reflects on generational differences in money management, stressing thriftiness and responsibility. The episode blends personal health experiences with practical advice on financial prudence and car buying.
