Things Frank Learned in Boston

Point 1: Even if you pull good jack right out of college, having no credit history can be a problem. I’m currently trying to get an Amex Blue card to start me off (I can use it at Neiman Marcus, all the shit’s insured, I don’t plan on carrying a balance, and it looks cool). Because of my lack of credit, Verizon required a $400 deposit to get my cellphone, and it wasn’t refundable for two years…fuck that! So I hauled over to Sprint and instead of paying $150 bucks for a phone that was color but looked like a toy and $400 in deposit at Werizon, I paid $80 bucks for a color phone that looks cool and zippo in deposit. Badass. And the service has been good in both Cambridge and Wisco.

Then, while opening my checking account, I asked last week at Fleet what kind of interest rates I’d be looking at for a car loan, and the chick (who was named Beth but seemed like she came from a non-English speaking Caribbean country) informed me exactly what my rate would be and that my income or other assets (only about half are at Fleet) wouldn’t affect my rate, only my ability to get approved. It was disappointingly straight-forward…I was hoping for more of a hedge fund-ish, complicated algorithm. Ah well, so it goes. I’d have to pay 7.74% APR at Fleet, which blows, but their average rate is only 7.24% compared to 3.5-5% for many other national lenders. So then I come back and I have a letter from Fleet saying they had rejected me for a car loan…what? You know you’re in trouble when your bank is preemptively rejecting you from loans. Of course they think I have half as much money as I do and don’t know my salary, so I would hope I could get a loan if I actually applied normally. Morons.

Point 2: Somerville sucks. Everyone knows this, but I thought some parts might be tolerable to live in…save some bucks, spend it on cars, right? I really don’t want to pay a lot for a place, and Somerville is obviously a cheaper place to live than Cambridge, but after visiting some apartments in Somerville I decided I can’t live there. Even though you’re pretty close to Harvard, there’s something intangibly depressing about the place. And depressing places tend to attract depressing people, as I found out. If you check out an apartment and the next guy who comes looking at the place looks like a 45-year old homeless man, it’s probably not a good fit. I also don’t want to have to drive home at night from everywhere because I’m afraid of being mugged if I walk. The area between Central and Harvard I liked a lot though. Hopefully something will work out in there.

Point 3: Car insurance is arbitrary and not nearly as scientific as I hoped. So I finally called up USAA insurance (the army/family of army people insurance agency) and got some quotes to see what I might be paying for car insurance. My boy Dick didn’t seem all that thrilled about quoting me the rates for a million different cars, so I went with a few basic ones. In Cambridge, with all the same liability coverage/mileage/etc that my parents currently have, it’ll cost me about $200/month to insure basically any of the cars I’m looking at. I didn’t both asking about TTs or Z3 Coupes because I’m thinking more practically these days. This might seem a lot, but I was actually pretty relieved…all along I’ve been thinking $200/month would be palatable (not good, but palatable). The really interesting part is that between a 1999 A4 2.8 Quattro ($2450/year), a 2000 Saab 9-5 Aero ($2570/year), and a 2002 C230 Kompressor ($2355/year), the Benz would be the cheapest to insure. What the hell??? Apparently it gets stolen the least, which I guess is the most important factor. I know it’s probably the safest of the three as well, which can’t hurt. Also I thought it was interesting that it doesn’t matter if I park in the street, a driveway, or a garage…I would have thought this would be a factor. I’d definitely consider a parking garage during the winter, at the very least on days when snowstorms are predicted.

Anyway, so that got me thinking long and hard about the C, and I’d say it’s probably the leader right now in my car search. There’s one in Boston with silver/black leather/10k miles for $21,998…so I’d still have two years of full warranty, one year of free maintenance, and slightly cheaper insurance. I realistically won’t get out the door with an A4 2.8 circa 35k miles for less than 19k, and that’d be without any warranty, which the AutoMax dude quoted me $1344 on for 3 yrs/100k miles. So the C is essentially $2000 more expensive. But it’s also a couple years newer, with less miles, faster, smaller, more practical, and more familiar to me. Shit…am I actually going to pull the trigger here? I may very well be driving a car that looks identical to my mom’s…and by choice. I’d have to get snows for the winter and then next spring I think I’d invest in either a set of C7 package wheels (10-spoke, 17”) or in some 17” Brabus MonoBlock IV’s. Fun.

I did test-drive a 230-horsepower silver/black 2000 Saab 9-5 Aero that’s $18,900 with only 32k miles. The interior was underwhelming and the seats and gauges were eerily similar to my old ’88 Saab 9000 S. That kind of ruined it for me…nice drive, tons of torque everywhere, handles well, but there was just something about it that didn’t do it for me.