You’ve taken out loans on both of your cars.

You might be an entrepreneur if…you’ve taken out loans on both of your cars.

Here’s how it works. “Sweetie, I need to make payroll in two days, and I’m $10K short. Can I make a cash advance on the credit cards?”

“No, they’re all maxed out.”

“What about our personal bank account’s overdraft account?”

“You maxed that out for the last payroll, remember?”

“Oh yeah…can we get any cash out of your 401k?”

“It’s only got $2K in it, and no, we can’t get it that fast.”

“Let’s see…can’t get an SBA loan from a bank that fast…don’t want to borrow from my dad again…can’t sell anything else on eBay…can’t sell the cars because we need them…hey, wait a second!”

“Oh great…”

“Yeah, can’t we get loans on the cars?”

A quick trip to the credit union, fill out some paperwork, and within 24 hours walk out with $14K, which promptly gets loaned to the business and disappears as though it never happened, except that you’ve got two new car payments every month but no new cars, just the same ones you had before with all the same problems.

One of those cars was a ’98 Hyundai Accent. Yeah, it looks like a pill and has no A/C but is cheap to maintain and works, at least up until 90k miles when it completely falls apart all of a sudden. Great, now we’ve got a car payment on a car that can’t be driven.

“Can we sell this car to the junk yard?”

“No, because we have to give them the title and we don’t have the title, the bank has it, and to get it we would need to pay off the loan on the car.”

“Well, we can’t afford to do that, so do we just keep making the payments on it?”

“I guess.”

“But where do we put the thing?”

So I call up the used car place from whence the cursed beast came and asked them if I could store the car on their lot temporarily until we figured out what to do with it. They said sure. That was about 2-3 years ago and I’ve never talked to that dealership again. I have no idea what’s happened to the car, but I think we’re still making payments on it. And my favorite umbrella is still in the trunk. I really should go get that one of these days, but then I’d have to talk to the dealer.