Shopping list for this week

• Car
• Spreadable butter

Just to put things in perspective, the entire email exchange with our insurance company for explaining and organizing car insurance, from first sending my UK licence through explaining and exchanging documentation for the entire process, spans 21 emails. A post about a Playstation game has gone back and forth for sixty comments since yesterday and has not yet stopped.

For the last ten days, I've been adjusting numbers in various spreadsheets and reading reams of advice online, trying to work out exactly what I'll be earning, what we'll be paying out with various approaches to down payment and financing, and learning to toughen myself up and prepare to negotiate when we go back to see Honda Man tomorrow. We're hoping to get quite a bit off the given price, as we've already been given a rather decent offer from someone down the road, that I convinced my contact to put down in writing - it seems, oddly, that the best tactic is to find the dealer who'll give you the best price, then avoid them completely and ask a reasonable-looking alternative dealer to beat their offer. But on top of that, I'm prepared for them to hit us with various surprise fees, including for documentation ($100 is normal, the $280-$250 range that we've been quoted is ludicrous) and made-up things like detailing, fabric protection and rustproofing. I feel that I've done a lot of research, and that I'm better-informed at this point than most dipsticks that go in to be cheated out of their money, but still, I'm nervous about not ever having done this before.

By sending out messages to local dealerships from manufacturers' sites, you pretty much earmark your email account as a spam folder for the next few weeks - I've had replied pouring into my inbox ever since we started looking, and have been feeling like some important businessperson having to answer constant phone calls and update people on the models I'm thinking about and the bids that I'm taking on them. Ford went one better - they sent us a little flowery "thank you" card which arrived in the post today, along with the salesman offering to pick us up if we ever wanted another test drive. What an industry.