I’m trying to buy a car. Està necesito. It has been my top priority for a week now, and lemme tell you what: it sucks. As it turns out, Panama is not interested in making vehicles easy to purchase. There are reasons that they have, but I am not interested in understanding. Only driving myself to Va & Ven for pollos fritos.
I could write a book on the process at this point. Luckily for my audience, I am a lazy man. This laziness is exacerbated by living in a tropical paradise. My laziness has peaked, while my enjoyment in car buying has cratered. Due to my great respect for my time and yours *cough*, I have decided to narrate my experience in relation to the money I have spent in pursuit of this goal.
$100 – My first taxi drive to La Chorrera an hour away so that the salesman could tell me it wasn’t fucking happening. I have filled out less paperwork selling a house.
$300 – Me hiring an “expert” that would assist me, since I must have pissed off the salesman. Maybe it was my hair. Or something was in my teeth. My expert said we could do it. Easy.
$160 – My first Western Union fee for a $2000 transfer to Panama. My normal bank transfer is going to take 21 days to clear, and I need the money now. Western Union was option 6.
$10 – Taxi to Coronado to collect the $2000. Did I mention that we tried to get $5000, but they didn’t have the cash? This trip took 4 hours.
$10 – Taxi number 2 to Coronado to get a bank reference letter. We also grabbed McDonalds, so this wasn’t so bad.
$500 – Bank transfer deposit to hold the car. I’m sure this pissed the salesman off.
$50 – Taxi to La Chorrera to give them documents. The salesman wasn’t there that day, so I gave them to his buddy. His buddy seemed to hate me, too. Starting to think I need to look at myself in the mirror before I leave the house.
$160 – Western Union #2
$10 – Taxi to get the money and walk it to the bank. Now we have enough funds, I think. I say “I think” because getting a solid number for a price is impossible here.
$15,400 – Bank transfer to the dealership. Turns out the first one worked? Now hopefully in 3-5 days, I’ll get a call that I can pay another $50 to go pick the car up and finally be a boy again.
The price of the car was originally $14,998. I originally thought I would total the numbers above and laugh about it, but it’s still too raw. It will just make me super bummed out and I will have to justify it by saying things like, “well, they do things differently here” and “well, a brand new one is $20,000 and has a bunch of fees, also” and “god damn, they fucked me”.
Have I learned a lesson? I don’t know, maybe. I guess if I could talk to myself in the past, I would say, “invest in Bitcoin”. In regards to this particular situation, I would probably do this whole shebang from the States. Have the car ready to go when I got here so that I wouldn’t have to drive all over the place and waste money. One good thing I have gained, however, is that I am great at calling a taxi en Español. I guess I can add that feather to my cap.
Probably could have just done that lesson on Duolingo.
I also got to spend a lot of time with my long-distance driver, Juan Carlos. He’s a great guy. He took this photo:
One step at a time.
Peace.
the eventually home 