My $679 Payment Hauled Mulch Exactly Twice in Nineteen Months

The loading scale at the Home Depot on Colorado Boulevard read 16 bags at 6:50 on a Saturday evening in May, and the bed of my F-150 swallowed em without noticing. The sign by the exit glowed the way it invariably had: box truck rental, $19.75, 75 minutes. I stood between my 2021 SuperCrew and that sign for a second too long, holding the orange receipt, doin the kind of arithmetic that quietly ends vehicle ownership. Two objects, one purpose. The truck cost $679 a month to think about mulch. The sign cost $19.75 to actually move it.

That week's numbers were already queued like jurors. The payment draft hit on the 9th: $679. The insurance on the 15th: $148. The fuel card was charting $211 for May alone, cuz 17.3 real-world miles per gallon is a lifestyle, and every one of those numbers arrived whether the bed carried mulch, moving boxes, or nothin but a lint roller and an ice scraper. My phone held a note titled truck jobs. Four entries. Nineteen months. The math was closing in like weather.

Here's the sentence it took me nineteen months to afford: the truck was the cheap part of the truck. The expensive parts were the drafts — payment, premium, pump — which show up on schedule with no interest whatsoever in whether you hauled a cord of firewood or a single bag of potting soil. By June I would sell it, and the envelope CarMax handed me at closing would contain a check for $288, which is a punchline, not a windfall. The sign by the exit had done the arithmetic at me. It invariably does. I ultimately stood still long enough to hear it.

14 bags and a $19.75 sign

The tally note, opened in that loading zone, read like an obituary written in installments. Entry one: March 2025, one couch, 38 miles round trip, sourced from a Facebook seller in Aurora for $200. Entry two: May 2025, fourteen bags of cedar mulch, the trip I now think of as the truck's debutante ball. Entry three: August 2025, my brother's Jetta on a tow dolly, Fort Collins to Colorado Springs, 124 miles, the only day the whole SuperCrew ever truly earned its name. Entry four: this. Sixteen bags. $214 of mulch riding on $37,700 of financed steel.

$37,700 of SuperCrew

Rewind to November 9, 2024, because the purchase deserves fairness. A 2021 F-150 XLT SuperCrew, 41,200 miles, in a blue they call Atlas, listed at $39,900 plus the usual documentary tax. I put $3,400 down and financed $37,700 at 9 percent for 72 months, $679 a month, and I signed it happily, snowboard in the back of my mind, a horizon of hardware runs and river trips and the general Colorado promise that a truck makes you the person who gets called when help is needed. I wanted to be that person. Being her cost $679 a month, as it turns out, plus the other two drafts.

11,400 miles in nineteen months

The odometer is the cleanest witness. In nineteen months I drove it 11,400 miles, about 600 a month, and of those miles I can account for exactly 162 that involved anything in the bed or on the hitch. The rest were solo commutes down Speer and I-25 with an empty five-and-a-half-foot box riding behind me like a banner that said optimist in reflective letters, paid for monthly. The tailgate came down for groceries maybe thirty times. The ski trips happened twice. Every ownership study ever printed says this is the average truck story, and I read them all smugly before I was in one.

the $148 line item

The fixed costs deserve their own roll call. Insurance, full coverage cuz the lienholder demands it: $148 a month. Registration in Colorado, weighted by the truck's class: $486 a year. Fuel: 659 gallons across the whole ownership, $2,168 at an average of $3.29, against a window sticker that promised 20 combined and delivered 17.3. Add up the $679, multiply by nineteen months of each, and the machine that hauled mulch twice cost $17,881 to keep, before registration, before a single oil change. I did the division standing in the loading zone. It did not favor me.

one couch, one brother, two springs

One job nearly justified it, and honesty requires the attempt. In August my brother's Jetta died in a Fort Collins parking lot, 74 miles north of my truck and my open Sunday, and I hooked an U-Haul dolly to the hitch and pulled his dead Volkswagen 124 miles south to a Colorado Springs shop near his new apartment. That day the truck was exactly the machine the brochure promised, and my brother said so, and the feeling was worth something real. Just not $17,881. The couch was a better metaphor: 38 miles, one seller, a $200 sleeper sofa that rode like freight in first class.

$29,900 and a clean title

June 6, a Saturday, I drove it to CarMax on South Colorado Boulevard and let the appraiser do what appraisers do. Their offer: $29,900. Carvana had emailed $29,050 two days earlier, and the Ford store I snagged it from offered $28,200 on trade against somethin newer, which tells you everything about who benefits from loyalty. The loan balance stood at $29,612. I chewed on the spread for one coffee. The check at closing was $288, the lien released in six days, and the note titled truck jobs got its fifth and final entry: June 2026, one truck, sold, survived.

what the rentals would have cost

The counterfactual, run honestly. Every job the truck did, priced as a rental: two mulch runs in a Home Depot box truck at $19.75 each, the couch in the same box truck for another $19.75, and one Sunday of a rental F-150 plus dolly at $129 plus $54 plus fuel — $250, round up generously, for everything the SuperCrew did in nineteen months. Against $17,881. The number isnt close. It isn't in the same county. If I towed every weekend or lived at the end of a washboard road, the math turns, and I'd defend the purchase at a bar fight; I did neither, and the mulch knew it.

the CX-5 in the same spot

Its replacement sits in the same garage spot: a 2019 CX-5 with a slight payment, a slight thirst, and a roof box for the snowboard. Last Tuesday I needed twelve bags of topsoil and a new hose reel, and I stood in the same loading zone at the same Home Depot, reading the same $19.75 sign with no $679 shadow behind me. Seventy minutes. $19.75. The box truck smelled like plywood and someone else's move, and I backed it up to the dock grinning like I'd gotten away with something, cuz standing between a truck and a sign had once taken me nineteen months to understand. I kept the orange receipt. The truck jobs note is now titled rental jobs, and it is winning.