[spdrun]

It wasn’t so different in the 90s — I went to public school with the son of the VP of a major telecom company, with children of Costa Rican immigrant laborers, and with children of plumbers and electricians. It all depends where you grow up. I think the East is still more mixed. Gated communities are pretty rare and public schools are still good enough (thanks to high property taxes) to allow people of different backgrounds to send their kids there.

[spdrun]

$2000? I know people in NJ were screaming when some schools imposed $150 per sport fees in 2009-2010. Ouch.

[spdrun]

Authorized refurb Thinkpads are rock solid, durable, and can be had for ~$300. You can buy a new laptop for that price as well in theory, but it won’t last terribly well if it’s used in a portable fashion.

[spdrun]

Oh come on, we all know that they’ll be commuting 3 hours round trip in self-driving cars powered by unicorn farts. Thus, they’ll have big houses with yards up in thar hills…

[spdrun]

See, I don’t know. In other parts of the country, lower middle-class people hike and camp as well. They just call it “hunting”, bringing guns and beer along and forgetting the granola bars.

[spdrun]

There are hikers and there are posers… It’s not really that hard or expensive to get equipment that works together, especially if you’re talking about day trips.

[spdrun]

[quote=CA Renter]I would at least wait until September-December to buy[/quote]

August is also a good month. It actually seems like the slowest month outside of December-early January.

[spdrun]

Or find friends who are into hiking rather than nightclubs…

[spdrun]

You can always use the downpayment to buy a rental in a cheaper/less desirable city and have some other Joe pay for part of your rent in SD.

[spdrun]

At least in NYC, Time Warner scrambled everything this year, requiring a box and more expensive plan. Solution: Mohu antenna to get over the air channels, and Netflix for the rest…

Oh, and grow some veggies 🙂

[spdrun]

Never trade it in. Sell it on Craigslist. You’ll likely get the same (or more) money, and you’re not enabling a system where dealers keep people in debt.

[spdrun]

Maybe his skater girlfriend got angry and turned him into a eunuch?

[spdrun]

Best to hope for lower oil prices to take some wind out of the market’s sails… then jump on something this fall or winter.

[spdrun]

I see you’re not a parent.

My parents drove older cars — somehow I’m not dead yet. Nor were we stranded at the side of the road basically ever. (The one time that happened involved us being sideswiped by a drunk driver at a toll booth with two Japanese exchange students in back, but that’s another story and beyond anyone’s control anyway.)

And we have narrower roads with smaller shoulders than you do in San Diego 🙂 You can’t fear every unlikely occurrence that the media says might happen. If something does happen, pull as far off the road as you can, get out, walk away from the road’s edge, and call for help. That wasn’t so hard, was it?

[spdrun]

Why worry about road trips in a 100k mile car? Most post-2000 cars will last for 200k if well maintained, if not longer.

Nothing wrong with travel if approached intelligently. Rent out the house on AirBnB, Craigslist, or to a friend through your network for a month, travel light, like college student backpackers. Or take a camping trip and rough it for a weekend.

Travel is part of education, not something to be avoided.

[Author]

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