Choices

As you might recall, Faye drives a Lincoln (my having a Mercedes Benz sounds like we are wealthy... let me assure you this is sadly not so). Repairs of such would likely be expensive. There is little reason to worry just yet, however, as the car came with a 4 year-60,000 mile warranty. On the other hand, we are far more likely to run out the time of that warranty then we are to run out the mileage.

Currently, she has something short of 2500 miles on the car. And it is only above, say, 1200 because we took a trip to Biloxi back in February. The odds of her putting more than 5,000 miles per year are miniscual. The other day we received an offer for an extended warranty from Lincoln and Faye asked me to inquire about it. Rather than just laugh and say "It's your car", I did as ordered.

In the end, we turned down the offer. It just isn't worth it. We can set aside money on a monthly basis to pay for any repairs after the warranty runs out and, basically, just self-insure. Logically, of course, we do not even need two cars. Yet we have them. Faye rarely goes further than the nearest supermarket (about 5 miles) and I rarely drive more than 10 miles. The problem is that we tend to need a car at the same time. We could work around that easily enough, I think, but neither of us is willing to give up the convenience yet.

The other choice we made had to do with the Sirius radio service. The Lincoln's complimentary subscription has run out and Sirius is starting to make offers. Now, some of the Lincoln's features rely an active subscription so they will no longer work. But we have learned that music can be loaded on a flash drive and listened to over the entertainment system (my Benz also has this feature). This gives us plenty of music to listen to and it is our preferred music, rather than what some service thinks would be desired. So we turned down (just ignored, really) the Sirius offer. If we spent a lot of time in the car, we might have been more amenable to it.

I do not understand paying for subscription music. From the first car I owned to the Benz, I have always thought of music as "free" (paid for, initially, by dealing with ads on the radio), choosing to load CD's, tapes, etc with music of my own choosing. Obviously, however, I am in the minority or companies like Sirius wouldn't exist.