Have too many cars
Most of us have an urge to collect things, even if we don’t admit it. Given the opportunity – the low-cost use of a barn or a hangar, for example – we might all accumulate a variety of pleasing classics for as long as funds allowed. But in reality there may be pressures to limit the accumulation of wheeled metal.
Your life partner might point out that time is even more precious than money, and that every extra car soaks up more of it. The classic car that ‘needs nothing done to it’ is a myth; even the highest-end cars from dealers and auction houses usually have something that needs improving. Arguing otherwise is futile, and inventiveness becomes necessary.
If a domestic limit to car numbers is imposed, one way to get round it is to insist that an upward rise in the inventory is temporary, pending the sale of another car, but the market isn’t quite right at the moment and it would be better to wait until the spring. By then, the new acquisition might not be noticed any more.
It’s possible to elevate this sale procrastination into a complex dynamic of asset movements, mostly inward, by convincing others that a new arrival has been bought purely to sell on at a profit. Of course the ‘profit’ bit won’t include the time you will spend making the car able to justify the higher price you hope to get, but it won’t matter because you’re intending to keep it anyway. And if it’s immobilised by the work you’re doing, or having done, then so much the better because there’s no point in trying to sell a car potentially worth much more once it works again. Which may well never happen.
As the fleet grows you will need new places to store them. The ones that work best can stay at home, with overspill in the office car park. If MOT’d and taxed, they can be dotted around roads near your house or billeted in the empty garages or barns of relatives. After this, it gets expensive because you’ll need proper paid-for storage, the drier the better.
It’s surprising how many cars are in such storage that their owners haven’t driven, or even seen, for years. At which point you wonder: shall I stop at, say, five cars and actually keep on top of them all?