Five years.
Sixty months.
Two hundred sixty weeks.
One thousand eight hundred twenty five days.
That sounds like a long period of time.
Wait.
One second longer…Yes, that’s a long time. It feels like a particularly long time to me since that is exactly the amount of time that I’ve been sending a large sum of money, by check or electronic transfer, every month to General Motors Acceptance Corporation which shall henceforth be designated GMAC.
The large sum of money I’m referring to, the amount of which shall not be revealed here but trust me is not a hundred or two hundred or three hundred hard-earned American dollars, but significantly more than that, is my car payment.
For the past one thousand eight hundred and twenty five days I’ve been sweating behind a plow, working my fingers to the bone, breaking my veritable back to scrape together enough change to make that payment every month, and still be able to eat.
I spell that number out instead of expressing it numerically because it’s seems longer and thereby articulates the period more the way it actually feels, which is more like a prison sentence than the terms of a loan.It certainly looks longer that 1,825 days.
But the fact of the matter is that I’ve actually been making a payment to some financial institution since I traded in my 1989 Toyota SR5 pick-up truck for a brand new Honda Accord in 1996.
Some numbers:

• 1986 Purchased a new Suzuki Samarai (they were so new then that they were still cool) I put 82,000 miles on it. Never put a single ding in it anywhere although it was running pretty sluggishly when I traded it in.
• 1989 Purchased a new Toyota SR5 Pick-up. Paid that vehicle off in 60 months and drove it for another 2 years putting a total of 125,000 miles on it before I traded that in. Again, never dinged it up in any way. I loved that truck and I actually cried when I left it behind in the dealer lot at Honda of Oxnard. I felt like I was abandoning a dying family member and running off with a new, young, buxom, blonde wife.
• 1996 Leased a new Honda Accord. I drove that car almost 36 months putting 88,000 miles on it. I was t-boned in it once in Glendale when a distracted, young Asian man ran a red light and plowed directly into me, knocking a cuban cigar that I won in a poker game and had just lit up, out of my mouth. Of course after the repairs were made it never felt or sounded the same. I also managed to smush-in the passenger side door on the southbound 101 on the way to the KROQ Almost Acoustic Christmas concert when I decided to veer off into the median of the southbound 101 in the San Fernando Valley instead of plowing full force into the rear end of a Buick LeSabre that was stopped in the fast lane.
• 1999 Leased a new Ford Explorer Sport. I drove that vehicle for another 36 months putting 92,000 miles on it. I never put a single dent or ding or scratch in that car but when I turned it back in to Power Ford in Valencia it had nasty gouges all the way around it, on all four sides, going back and forth, caused by some disturbed and unprincipled individual who decided it might be fun to drag a key or a nail or some other sharp, pointed object along the painted part of my car while applying a substantial amount of pressure.
• July, 2002 Leased another new Ford Explorer Sport from POWER FORD in Valencia. I guess I liked the other one.
• July, 2002, two weeks later. Returned new Ford Explorer Sport to POWER FORD in Valencia and left with my old Ford Explorer Sport after CFO of POWER FORD in Valencia called me at work and threatened to destroy my credit rating by calling Ford Motor Credit, the lien holder on the old Explorer and telling them to come and “repossess” my car because they didn’t like the deal that I negotiated with their inept sales manager and that they were actually going to lose money. Long story, but after some brief research I discovered that yes, they CAN do that. Needless to say, I don’t have any kind words to say about POWER FORD on Creekside Road in Valencia. I definitely would not recommend that anyone have any dealings whatsoever with POWER FORD in Valencia or any of the other POWER AUTOMOTIVE GROUP family of car dealers or any of their affiliates or subsidiaries of POWER FORD, POWER AUTOMOTIVE GROUP or AUTONATION.
• July, 2002 purchased new Saturn Vue AWD from Galpin of Santa Clarita Valley.
• October, 2002 Refinanced the Vue with GMAC at a very fair rate of 1.25% compounded annually.

One thousand eight hundred twenty five days later, on Monday of this week, I received from GMAC, in the mail, the pink slip for the Vue which now has 125,000 miles on it and is still running on the same spark plugs that were installed in the engine when it was manufactured in France.
Yes, they do assemble the Saturn in Spring Hill, Tennessee but the power train is made “over there.”
The not-so-funny part is that I never really liked the Vue from the day I drove it off the lot. I had to have 18 inch, custom rims, a full leather interior and a power moon roof installed just to give it enough testosterone so that I wouldn’t feel like a soccer mom.
If I didn’t find myself in a situation where I needed to get a new car, in a hurry because the lease was up on the old one and I was being bent over far enough already by the lien holder because of excessive mileage, I would have never bought a Saturn Vue.
Whatever, now I own it and I’ll never make another payment on it again.
I got the calculator out yesterday and figured out that over the past one thousand eight hundred twenty five days I only paid $1,536 in interest. Really, that is not too bad for that term.
Oh, and while we’re at it, except for a period of approximately 24 months between 1994 and 1996 I’ve been making car payments for the past 21 years and since 1986 I’ve driven at least 512,000 miles.
That’s actually more than the distance to the moon and back, give or take a few meters.