![\"TheBeastie\"](\"\/blog\/images\/thebeastie.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nWhile she has been a good car, it is time to retire The Beastie and move on to something a little more current. I introduce to you my new 2004 Kia Optima LX:<\/p>\n
<\/a> <\/p>\n She comes complete with power windows & locks, disc brakes at all wheels, CD player, cruise control, A\/C, a 2.4 liter 4-cylinder motor and 5-speed manual transmission. Oh, and most important of all:<\/p>\n CUPHOLDERS!! Yay!!!<\/p>\n And get this: apparently there have been far too many movies and TV shows where people get locked in the trunk. They now have glow-in-the-dark handles on the inside of the trunk lid to open it from inside. I guess the mobsters will have to keep up the maintenance on their old cars now.<\/p>\n I know I had originally specified an automatic trans, but they didn’t have one on a nice car in my price range. And this is by far the nicest car I have ever owned. Only two years old and only 22,000 miles from the previous owner (who traded up).<\/p>\n The folks down at Bob Lanphere’s Beaverton Kia<\/a> made this a very simple and low-stress event. They listened to me when I told them my requirements over the phone, had an appropriate list of vehicles for me to choose from, and didn’t waste my time with bullshit. You need a car, go down there and ask for Adam.<\/p>\n So what did it cost me? less than I would have thought. Actual price of the car was $10,995 and I added the G.A.P. policy to bring that up a bit. The GAP policy is a kind of insurance that protects me while the car is worth less than what I owe on it. Interest rates being what they are, the first half of a loan’s life is usually more than the MSRP of the car – which means you could end up having to keep making payments if the car gets totaled. It works out to $5 a month, so I thought it would be worth it.<\/p>\n Okay, so that’s what the price was. With interest, the car will cost me close to $17,000 if I just make the payments as listed for the next 72 months. This works out to 18% or so. Yes, it’s high – my credit sucks. There is no penalty, however, for paying it off early or refinancing, and extra payments go straight toward the capital amount. So, come tax time I can drop a heavy payment of $1,000 or so on it and cut the interest off the back half of the loan. Do this every year and I can save myself some serious dough.<\/p>\n The car is as yet un-named, though several ideas have been bantered back-and-forth with Tolerant. We both thought of “Jeeves”, mainly due to this being such a nice car and it kind-of reminds me of a Jaguar. Cars and ships should have feminine names, however, so this won’t do. Tolerant’s idea of “Kitty” just didn’t seem right, and when she said “Pussygalore” I just about fell over.<\/p>\n She did have one idea that is growing on me: “Holly”, or more completely “the H.S. Holly”, with ‘H.S.’ standing for Highway Ship – which is kinda fitting, considering this is the second-largest car I have ever owned. (It’s hard to tell from the photos, but the new car is longer and wider than the Beastie – though not anywhere near as big as the old Plymouth was.)<\/p>\n Anyway, I’m starting to think that “the H.S. Golightly”, (known as “Holly” to her friends) isn’t such a bad idea. It’s early days yet though, and the car hasn’t had a chance to assert a personality.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It appears that my luck was in. For those of you that did not know her, I present to you The Little Black Beastie that has been my near-constant companion Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=564"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/p>\n