1) You’re bad at maths because you bought a new car
Quite a few of my friends read my blog. Some of them like Wendy* are even on board with the whole save enough to retire really young idea, but maths isn’t her forte as the following conversation should show:
Wendy: Can you believe Bill* just bought that big BMW*. So stupid, he makes less than I do. What do you think it cost?
Patrick: Well it was about 2 years old, so it’s probably worth around R300 000.
Wendy: R300 000! I’d never spend that on a used car. I’d much rather get a new one for that price. What an idiot.
Patrick: Well the minute you drove out of the showroom in a new R300k car you’d lose R60 000. After one year of owning it your total loss would be around R90 000. After a year of owning his used car, Bill would only lose R30 000.
Conversations like that often have a lot of uncomfortable silence following them, especially when Ms want to be frugal bought a brand new (though much cheaper) Kia a few months back.
*Names and even cars have been changed. I’ve learnt my lesson on using even relatively similar examples before.
I have a machine that prints money. It’s legal too, and operates on nothing more than cheesecake. That’s right, nothing but pure cheesecake. I have two others that operate on a combination of cheesecake and a teeny tiny amount of electricity. My brother has two of these, and I’m buying one for my wife now too so we can use ours together. These machines are really quite common, I’ve been trying to get Orca to buy one that would run on beer, since he often has a surplus of that 🙂
My favourite computer game as a child (yes we had computers back then, much to my son’s disbelief) was Lemmings. In this game you’d have to rescue these humanoid lemmings who were too stupid to do anything else except follow their leader to their doom. Sounds pretty much like our government at the moment doesn’t it?
It’s April fools day, but since I’m still upset that I fell for two of them (Heyneke Meyer returning as springbok coach and myBroadBand launching uncapped fibre for R99 a month) I thought I’d spare you any more stupid practical jokes.
