911
Drive a Porsche 911 at least once in your life. It's the best sports car in the world that you can also drive every day. Not necessarily the most reliable one, though.
Porsche has a great warranty program, Porsche Approved, which you can keep extending until the car is 15 years old, and buy for the last time before it passes 200,000 kilometers. It comes with roadside assistance. If the car breaks down, a tow truck shows up, takes it to the service center, and you get a loaner for as long as the repair takes. Once it's fixed, the car is delivered back to your door.
Step one toward buying: find someone who already owns one. Get everything firsthand and work out how much it'll cost you per month. If you don't know anyone like that, just send me a message.
Don't forget to add in the cost of servicing, the warranty and running costs. A set of winter wheels can cost as much as a small used city car, and a year of insurance runs 2–3% of the car's value.
I started my adventure by signing up for a Porsche Driving Experience to drive on a track. It's not a cheap day out, but you'll never forget it.
Assets and liabilities
The most important thing I've learned from buying cars is this: if you feel the car is too expensive, it means you're not financially ready for it yet.
Always start by putting your money into assets, not by buying expensive toys.
Only when my assets were worth four times the price of the car did I feel it was a level of risk I could afford. In the worst case, I could cash out part of my investments to pay off the lease.
Dropping a big pile of cash, even if you have it, isn't the best way to go, because there's nothing sweeter than having cash on hand when an investment opportunity comes along.
Consider financing it with an operating lease, which lets you:
- Hold on to your cash and pay off the lease from your current income.
- Buy assets that partly or fully cover the lease payments. You pay the rest from your current income.
Let me stress this once more. It's better to spend your cash on an asset whose returns will cover your other obligations. That's how you build wealth.
If things go wrong, you have cash or assets as a safety net to pay off your debt.
On top of that, you should always have a financial cushion for unexpected costs, which will definitely help you sleep better.
And do extra costs and problems happen? You bet. I've been through three 911s already:
- The 997 needed an engine rebuild that cost 25% of the car's value, and I waited in line for it for over six months.
- In the 991 I had an accident and the car was totaled. Luckily I didn't kill anyone, and insurance covered almost all of the damage.
- With the next one, the water pump died on the way to our vacation and we were stuck at the service center for 4 days. Later a spring snapped, so we had to cancel our road trip and eat the hotel cancellation fees. All of these repairs were done under warranty. That's why it's so important to have one, because otherwise the bills would have run into tens of thousands of złoty (many thousands of dollars).
So manage your risk wisely. Don't take on high risk to buy things that don't make you money.
Is it worth it? Every time I turn the key, it's just as much fun as the first time, and my heart starts beating faster. What a feeling!
At a Śniadanie & Gablota meetup:
Which one's yours?
Both. You need two Porsches. One's always in the shop.