My first car & Middle Class rules- An excerpt from Chapter 3 of “BE A HATER”

The example that came to mind for me was my first car as a teenager. When I was 15 years old, recognizing that I would soon be driving I set out to secure a vehicle. My first car was a 1991 ford Taurus that I purchased from a family friend for $200. All of the windows in the car including the front and back windshield were broken out. The battery was dead and the engine needed a lot of work. But I knew that I had to get the car running. Not so that I could use it for transportation, but because I had purchased two 15-inch speakers and a 600-watt amplifier that I wanted to get wired up into the car. I was going to pair it with some internal lights that flashed when the bass played. And that way everyone would know that I was coming from a block away and see that “my ride was fly”. I had adopted this mindset because this was the approach that my friends and peers at the time had. A car was not for transportation it was for display. You had to show that you had one. As a lower income teenager, having a car in itself was an accomplishment, but having one that was “laid” was a win. I had to show that I had the money to buy the car and “lay it out”, because money’s purpose was to be spent. This lesson was never formally taught to me, but the conversations of my friends and peers at the time had subconsciously shaped the way that I viewed money and specifically my car. Fast forward to me sitting in a room years later listening to my colleague discuss the hidden rules of money. I looked back and recognized that for several years now I had not thought about spending money as something that is supposed to be done with money. In fact, I hated spending money. I no longer thought spending money on a car was cool. I thought not having a car payment and instead paying your car payment to your savings account was cool. The purpose of money for me at that point was to be managed not spent. Spending was a necessary evil, not a preferred way of utilizing money. It was far more important to save money or to figure out how to decrease expenditures. These were the thoughts that I now had. At that moment I recognized that I had not been formally taught these ideas and beliefs either. I had adopted them just by nature of them being the prevalent ideas in the discourse and exchanges that were happening around me. I myself was impacted by the hidden middle class rules, silently, implicitly, and without my consent. I was “inceptioned”.