Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip Heath & Dan Heath

Author:Chip Heath & Dan Heath [Heath, Chip]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780307956415
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2013-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

IT WAS PRECISELY THE fear of being overcome by emotion that led Andrew Hallam, a Canadian high-school English teacher, to invent his own car-buying process. Hallam was no ordinary teacher. On his meager salary, he scraped and invested his way to becoming a debt-free millionaire in his thirties. In his book, Millionaire Teacher, he shared his secrets. Many of them involved truly pioneering ways of being cheap/frugal (half empty/half full). Tired of paying for gas to get to work, he started riding his bike for the 70-mile round-trip. In the winters, he’d live rent free by house-sitting for couples who’d gone south for the winter. He never turned on the heat—not even when his dad visited—preferring to walk around the house wearing many layers of shirts and sweaters.

So, in 2002, when he was ready to buy a car, Hallam refused to let himself be hoodwinked by car salesmen. He had a healthy fear of their sales prowess. “Imagine wandering onto a car lot.… A sharply dressed salesperson will soon be courting you through a variety of makes and models. They could have the very best of intentions, but if you’re anything like me, your pulse will race a bit faster as you’re shadowed, and the pressure of being shadowed by a slick talker might throw you off. After all, you’re on their turf. A minnow like me needs an effective strategy against big, hungry, experienced fish.”

His strategy was simple: First, he decided exactly what he wanted in a used car: namely, a Japanese car with a stick shift, original paint, fewer than 80,000 miles, and a walk-out price of less than $3,000. (He didn’t want a new paint job because he worried that it might hide rust spots or damage from accidents.) He didn’t care about the age or model of the car.

Committed to stick with his criteria, he started calling up car dealerships within a 20-mile radius. Many tried “tempting him into their lairs,” encouraging him to visit for a test-drive or a great deal that was just outside his budget range. Some scoffed at his budget and tried to talk him upward. “I did have to hold my ground with aggressive sales staff,” said Hallam. “But it was a lot easier to do over the telephone than it would have been in person.”

Eventually, one dealership called him back. An elderly couple had traded in an older Toyota Tercel with only 30,000 miles on it, and it hadn’t yet been cleaned or inspected. They offered to sell it for $3,000, and Hallam accepted. He’d beaten the high-pressure sales game by avoiding it altogether.

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