One car bought for face, and its bill

Before a school reunion he bought a car worth fifty million won — thirty-six months of payments, nine hundred thousand a month. At the reunion his friends glanced at it once and went back to their own stories. Three years later it sold for half. "It's not the money I mind," he says. "It's that I decided like that." In a survey of spending regrets among Koreans in their fifties and sixties, the biggest was emotional spending — face, hurry, showing off — with cars at the top.