New Car!

I got a new car. It was something I needed to do, and wasn't sure it was the right thing to do. I almost had myself talked out of the deal, and then I thought about driving the Avalon for the next three years, hauling a trailer to and from school. It just made me crazy. It just doesn't have the space I need to carry everything to and from every week.

I found a really good car, a couple of years newer than my current, the monthly is the same, and the mileage is much better than it was when I bought my current car.

I got my '97 Toyota Avalon about five years ago. I just paid it off. It had 184K miles on it at the time, and 214K miles, now. I got a decent deal on it, but had to re-finance it to the monthly payments when I lost my job in 2010.

Well, this is a Subaru Outback Legacy, 118K miles, and it's a '99. I am adding my own cash to the deal, so the payments for three years will be the same as what I was paying on the Avalon. The CarFax is good, and even my banker said it was a good car. My mechanic recommended it to me. So, I'm reasonably certain that it will do me a good job over the next three years, while I'm in school, and paying on it. It has the space I need and all the bells and whistles work.

So, I got my dream car, kept the payment, but all is well. I'll sell my Avalon, get a bit back on what I've paid for it, and apply that to the loan. The interest rate is slightly better than what I was paying on the Avalon, but not much. I'll need to increase my income substantially to make that happen. And if I did that, I'd probably have gotten a much newer car and ended up with a larger payment!