Pulled the Trigger

I wanted to keep my old car, a 2006 sedan, for another year.  But, it didn't happen.  My old car was simply becoming too unreliable, especially since I'm often driving Baby Sam.  So, my options included investing about $4,000 in repairs or moving on.

I opted to move on.  While I could have kept my old car and invested in repairs, our lifestyle and needs have, with a baby, changed.  Babies bring along stuff, strollers, bikes, pack and play contraptions, etc.  So even if I spent the money to repair my car, I still felt like it no longer fit our needs for a family car.  Mr. Sam has a relatively new truck, but since its an open air bed truck, we don't normally use it for family trips or travel.

We ended up doing the research, test driving several models within the class we were interested in (small SUVs), shopping for the one we settled on, negotiating sale, finding financing, buying the car and selling my old car within a week.

Which means, instead of paying off our car debt this year (Mr. Sam's truck will be paid off by summer), we added a new debt to our family budget.  We paid for my nused car half in cash and then financed the other half at 2.8%.  I was bummed that I couldn't get 0% which is the interest rate on Mr. Sam's truck loan.  But, its a short loan, 24 months so the interest total overall is low.

I'm disappointed that we didn't save up and pay in cash for my nused car, in the same way I was disappointed that we didn't pay cash for Mr. Sam's truck (we basically did the same thing for Mr. Sam's truck, paid half in cash and then financed the other half except we got 0% since it was a new truck).  I believe in Dave Ramsey's plan to never have another car payment in your life, yet here we are with car payments.  On the other hand, I need reliable transportation both for family and work and I didn't want to empty out our savings account solely to avoid taking on the debt.