As much as I see the value in a deision journal, and I really think its helped me make better decisions, I realised today that there are times where its imperative to make quick decisions where time is of the essence and an opportunity may be lost if the process is too drawnout.
Obviously the hope is that some of the lessons learnt from writing a journal such as this will flow into quick decisions as well, inversion, baysian probability, expectancy etc.
Todays example was that I saw a hilux ute for sale at $3750, we have saved nearly $3000 towards a replacement car for Sal as her old hilux ute has a pretty serious death rattle in the engine and needs quite a bit of work done on it. The problem was that when I rang the guy selling the car, he already had someone who was coming to look at it and had received a lot of calls from interested people.
I went and took it for a test drive, and took it to our mechanic to have him look over it for anything that really jumped out. He said everything looked good with it and that it drove well. I knew I had got in for a test drive before the first person who had rung about it, but obviously he would get first refusal at the asking price. I decided on the spot that we should buy it, cars like this in this condition dont come up often and the price was more than fair. (on checking the cheapest similar car I could find in australia was $5000 and most were nearer $9-10K.) I figured we would likely sell Sals old ute for what we paid for it, $1500, so we would get into the new one for under $2500.
Having decided I wanted the car, I then made another decision, I knew that if the other party offered the asking price, they would get it on the basis of first in, best dressed. So I made the decision to offer $4000 or $250 over the asking price. I figured $250 was nothing really to secure the car if I really wanted it and I suspected that such a strong offer, with a '4' in front instead of a '3' would make it very likely the owner would sell to me despite me being 2nd in line and I thought it unlikely the other party would want to offer more.
It proved to be correct and we got the car. Had I taken time to deliberate, and write down a case for and against the decision we would certainly have missed out.
What I could have done better was apply some of the models that I have practicised in the decision journal into the 'on the run' decision.
So, invert, "What happens if we dont buy this car". Well, we have our budgeted cash still to buy something else. We might not need to bbuy anything else as the old car might have kept running for another how ever many years.
So, probability, The car has already lasted 3 years without dying, probability is likely better than 50% it would go another 3 years. But it does need a new exhaust and the brakes are sounding like they need money spent on them too. The probability of the motor dying may only be less than 50%, but the consequence would be that there was no residual value, so say 50% * $1000 for a sale later = $500 plus 50%*$0 if it dies, =$500 + $0 = $500. That implies if we can sell it for anymore than $500 we are better to sell it now.
Also probability of finding another car for round our budget if the current one dies down the track is quite low. I reckon maybe 6 or so a year come up, so in any given month only a 50% chance. I think we could say a 50% chance of buying something at $4000 =$2000 plus the 50% chance we would have to pay more like $10K which is the next sort of price bracket for utes = $5000, so an expectancy of $7000. This implies buying at $4k now and still having a saleable car for $1K+ is the better option.
What could go wrong, we could sell the old car and then the new one could have some unexpected mechanical fault that turned out to be expensive. We could find we cant get any decent offers for the old one, something much better could come along for a similar price. None of these seem to be worse consequneces that the possibility of the old one dying, being worth nothing and no cheap replacements available.
Update - we sold the old ute for $1600, which is $100 more than we paid for it 3 years ago! Mind you if running costs were included it would be a different story, none the less its no mean feat to sell a car for more than you paid for it and now we have done that twice in a row. The result is that it only cost us $2400 to move into the new Hilux, which is a satisfactory outcome in my view.
