Screw List Items That Will Help Us Be More Thankful This Coming Thanksgiving

The next item on our Screw List concerns cars. As you likely know, the cost of cars, particularly used cars, has jumped. Quick example: Our car is worth more today than it was two years ago. The reason I know: The dealer contacted us to see if we wanted to swap it for a newer model. Not new, mind you, since many new cars are either unavailable for months, or their prices have jumped as well. I did check out the deal and it made no sense: swap mine for an older vehicle that costs more. The only reason anyone might respond: The monthly payments just be lower that what they're paying now. 

And that brings us to what it is about cars that puts them on the Screw List. Simply this: With suppressed interest rates driving down the monthly payment charged for leases and car loans, the price of cars has climbed aggressively. While in the past many folks would buy a car for cash, these days most folks can't come up with the cash for an outright purchase. 

Then again, who buys any high ticket items anymore? It's all about the monthly payment these days. Just check ads for cars. You have to search for the price. Front and center: only the monthly payment. "For $329/mo. you can get you into a ---." Fill in the blanks.

Of course, house sales have also been based on monthly cost for years now. No one can afford to buy a house for cash unless they're rich. I know folks who did in fact buy a house for cash - a long, long time ago - who weren't rich. Working people, they were. And who couldn't pay cash took as small a mortgage as possible, then paid it down quickly.

What's happened to change all that? This: As rates were driven into the deep, prices rose commensurately. That dynamic - falling monthly payments, higher house prices, has slowly progressed since 1980 or so, when rates began to drop from historic highs. (Remember the inflation and high interest rates of the 1970s?) As rates dropped, prices rose. Folks took to thinking monthly payment rather than actual cost. Of course, as prices rose, people couldn't afford to buy for cash. It's been an unhappy feedback loop - unhappy if you're one of the few who look beyond monthly payments. For those who live by such payments, it doesn't particularly matter.

And that process has accelerated since the Fed slammed interest rates down starting in 2008. 

So we add houses to cars as the next items on our Screw List.

 

But wait! Thanksgiving's coming. For some of us, it's just about the #1 holiday - at least when it comes to getting with family and friends and enjoying good food and drink. Sure, July 4th BBQs are fun. And the Christmas-New Years stretch can find us enjoying good company accompanied by that good food and drink. But somehow Thanksgiving brings the good company-food-drink Triumvirate together in one strong dose.

Folks are traveling again, they say. So there won't be that stupid "isolate yourself" Thanksgiving our masters demanded last year. Even if they did demand it, would people really pay much attention? 

Well, some likely would. There's a good-sized chunk of us - "the Vaccinated" - who've apparently circled wagons to defend against "the Unvaccinated." Will they keep un-jabbed family and friends at a distance? How sad if they do. Why would they do this? They think they'll be somehow tainted. The fact that the jabbed can spread COVID more easily doesn't phase them. To be Vaccinated has become a sign of the Saved. It's really almost (maybe is) a religious-cultish thing.

But no matter. God has given all of us great blessings. Even those of us who've had a particularly rough year can make the effort to find blessings they've received in face of any difficulties. If you're in that camp, make the effort. It'll be worth it. You'll see God as the loving Father He really is. Thanking Him will flow naturally at that point. I'm speaking from experience here. Join me.

But what of the "Screw List"? None of the items we've covered so far are blessings, right? Or are they? 

Those suppressed interest rates that distort, even undermine, our ability to plan, especially when it comes to planning for a long stretch of years in retirement, when we don't have income rolling in anymore. How could such an obvious attack on our financial well-being be a blessing? Can the driving up of prices for big ticket items like cars and houses be a blessing?

Of course it's not. But let's think of these items from another perspective. Maybe God is challenging us here.

The fact is, all that occurs in this world unfolds as part of God's Plan. In some mysterious way that Plan encompasses everyone and everything. But it also zeroes in on each of us in our own particular circumstances. In that light, the "retirement challenge" has a societal impact, as well as the specific impact it has on your individual and family planning. When it comes to the retirement challenge - really, in most instances, a dilemma - we might think of not only ourselves, but all those around us, facing the same issues.

As for the high cost of cars and houses - unaffordable in the older way of thinking - they might cause us to step back and think about spending inordinate amounts of money on material things - big or small. In doing so, maybe we communicate some of our thinking to our loved ones, especially our children. So many of them have no clue about money, not running up credit card balances, as they exit college with a huge lump of debt...and so on.

With such thinking, we might try to connect spiritual dots between God, ourselves, our families, and our neighbors. As we do, recall that the life we live in this world of ours is not day at the beach. I don't know about you, but that's been my experience over the years. There are always ups and downs. And some of the downs can be BIG DOWNS.

Right?

Seen in this light, the retirement challenge, indeed all items we might load into our Screw List, take their place along with all the other difficulties, temptations, and sufferings that bring us anxiety and sorrow as we make our way through what we Catholics sometimes refer to as this "Valley of Tears."

Look, if you don't see or accept the bad with the good; if you direct your vision only through rose-colored glasses, even in the face of personal pain and sorrow, you may not take to this easily. But I can assure you it is, in fact, reality. Ignore or reject it and you're living in a basically irrational, even insane world of your own imagination.

And in this more natural light, we can take the bad as a call from our loving Father to wake up and value the spiritual above the material. 

If we can do this, we can get to the point of thanking God even for what we don't particularly like about our lives, not just the good stuff. Do that and it will be special Thanksgiving this year.

Make sense?