[Rain Man]

I've had the apricot BMW for 12 years now, and it's an awesome car. But it's been our only car for about five years, and the wife has some hobbies where she needs to carry around bigger things (art canvases? art canvassi? art canvi?). We also got a taste of the new technology with a loaner a while back and were both intrigued. I love my little roadster and it look like it's straight off the showroom floor, but it makes no sense to own two cars. So anyone want a good deal on an awesome roadster convertible?

Anyway, it's kind of my wife's turn to pick the new car, and ... my god, who can afford to buy a new car these days? She was initially hoping to buy a brand new car, which we've never done, and she liked those Lexus SUVs. However, we sat down and started pricing out what she wanted and the price came to $61,157. That's not even fully tricked out. Admittedly, it was probably 80 percent of the way to fully tricked out, but come on. $61,000 for something that's going to depreciate? If I'm going to pay that kind of coinage, I'm buying a DeLorean or something. Fortunately, my wife also shook her head and said that we're not doing that.

I think we're going back to our standard approach of buying a two-year old car with relatively high mileage of 20,000 to 40,000 miles. We're low-mileage drivers, so we tend to convert high-mileage cars to low-mileage cars over time, and the mileage will pull the price down.

I'm pretty sure we're going to go with a 2014 BMW X1. We drove one for a couple of days this summer as a loaner, and it was really nice. It'll be big enough to satisfy my wife's hobbies, and you can buy a tricked-out one in the low $30s. If I can't sell my beloved apricot Z3 outright, we'll trade it in and can probably get the cost below $30k, which seems reasonable. Anyone got a good deal on a BMW X1 for me?

But seriously, how do these companies sell $60,000 vehicles? Many of the BMWs run in that range, the Lexus SUVs run that, and don't even get me started on the Porsches. I was kind of interested in that new SUV of theirs, but I'm not going to put off retirement to buy one.