February 18th, 2019

Well we did it.  We made the leap back into the car payment fray.  What a scary decision.  

Tim and I tend to keep cars a long time.  I know, I know, there are folks who pretty much always have a shiny newish car.  I say newish.  I mean no more than 3 years old.  And that's fine.  For them.  I can admire their pretty shiny new(ish) car without harboring any desire to run out and buy one myself.

It's not the car itself. It's the car payment.  I can always think of so many more things to do with that money.  Like keep it in the bank.

Our goal is always to not have a car payment as long as possible.  And if a car is properly maintained, we always shoot for at least 10 years. Yup. A decade of car ownership for each auto. Minimum.  And our last cars were even older than that!~  We did good!  

We traded in my car.  For several reasons.  One, my old jeep had a lot less mileage than Tim's old car.  In fact, my faithful old jeep, circa 2004, had only 74,000 miles on it. Which makes it younger in car years.  The second reason was that my old vehicle had more wrong with it.  Expensive to fix things. Like......no working air conditioning.  And it wasn't just a small easy fix. No no. Of course not.  Getting the AC working again in my car would have been a very expensive thing.  Tim's old car on the other hand has perfectly lovely air conditioning. So it just made sense to get rid of the car with the most issues.

There comes a point when we have to make the decision of whether or not to invest more money into an old car or get rid of it.  And it's a hard choice sometimes.  If it's just a normal maintenance thing like, oh say, brakes.  Well occasionally brakes need to be fixed.  It's not inexpensive, but if the car is otherwise is great shape, worth the cost.  But spend thousands of dollars to fix the air conditioning in a a 15 year old car that also has a power leak somewhere and needs new tires?  Nope.  Suddenly the decision gets easier.

And so it was done.  Friday, Tim drove my car...first through a car wash, then to the dealership and in a remarkably short amount of time, he was driving back home in his new car.  Well new to him car.  It's actually a gently used car.  We do tend to buy gently used cars rather than new ones.  Why?  well let's think about this.  Whenever anyone buys a BRAND new car, the instant it is driven off the lot by it's happy new owners, it has immediately depreciated about ten grand.  There's a good reason right there.  Then too, a gently used car, is already broken in.  The bugs have been worked out.  And of course the biggest reason of all, it's less expensive!

Tim's new to him car is gorgeous!~  It's comfy and roomy and has all sorts of fancyschmancy doodads. And it looks brand new.  But since it wasn't.... less expensive.  As the front seat passenger, I'm still getting the hang of all the buttons.  Spent some time figuring out the Nav system and playing with the heated&cooled seats this weekend.  And I even sat in the backseat for awhile as we drove around, playing with all the buttons back there.  

So there you have it.  We will focus on paying off this new car as quickly as possible so that we can go back to not having a car payment again.  (YES!)  And we don't have to worry about is the car going to break down, does the AC work,  did the tire go flat again?  

​I am the proud new owner of Tim's old car...handsome old devil that it is.

The first thing I did was to take all of Tim's stuff out of it. in additiion to the normal stuff a car seems to accumulate there was  - no exaggeration - about thirty dollars in change !!!   Then I cleaned.  A lot. I need to clean more. I need to do a big scrubadub but I got tired.  I'll work on it more this week.  

So I suppose congrats are in order.  New cars!  Woohoo!  Well new to us cars.  And they will stay feeling really new until they are totally broken in.  Somebody has to be the first one to spill something in it.  Gotta get past that first parking lot ding, the first spill, the first dirt on the floor or smudge on the seat.  Once that happens, it's no longer a "new" car and we can relax more.

We are so weird. :)