If I had to choose how to spend our hard-earned money, repairing a vehicle would be at the very bottom. But that’s the decision we faced last weekend.
Our History With Cars
When Blake and I got married in 2009, I had a 2001 Chevy Malibu and he had a 2003 Chevy Malibu. (I guess we were meant to be! LOL)
With our goal of getting out of debt as fast as we could, we decided to keep those cars as long as possible. With good maintenance and a few repairs along the way (due to being over 100K miles), we were able to drive them as long as we needed.
Buying With Cash
We replaced my car with our 2007 Hyundai Entourage van in December 2014. No, we didn’t buy a fancy, new van. We had saved cash and were pregnant with our third kid. We bought what we could afford.
In December 2016, we had saved enough cash to buy Blake a 2010 Hyundai Elantra.
The purchasing stories for those two vehicles are fantastic so I’ll share them at some point.
So now we have two “older” vehicles that are doing great for our family and we do the regular maintenance on them. It helps a lot that Blake has gotten quite handy with many car repairs thanks to Youtube.
With our van at 165,000 miles and few minor issues starting to repeat, we decided last summer to start socking away money for another van so we’d be ready when it was time.
The Van Dilemma
Last Thursday I had to run a few errands and as I pulled onto our street, the van shuddered and the dashboard lit up like a Christmas tree. Hmmm, that’s not good.
I pulled into our driveway as it died. Awesome.
I was so thankful I’d made it home but couldn’t get it to restart so we ended up having it towed to our mechanic.
Blake & I knew it’d likely be an expensive repair so we started looking online at vans just in case.
We got the call on Friday. “Ma’am, you’re looking at about $1000-2000 in repairs, depending on what you have done to get it running again.”
BIG PAUSE HERE, FOLKS!
We have an emergency savings account. We’ve also learned to take these emergencies in stride. Blake nor I felt stressed. (That’s crazy to me but it’s true.)
Did you know that emergencies always come in threes? It’s a law of life or something. So in that 48 hour span, we’d also had two sick kids and the power at our house went out for an hour. Good times.
Living a debt-free life doesn’t mean you have no challenges. It just means you get to respond to those challenges differently. You aren’t tossed around by your circumstances. You are in control because you took control of your finances.
BACK TO THE STORY
So Blake & I talked on the phone for awhile. Do we repair or do we buy another van?
So we hopped on CarGurus and set our filters. We wanted something 2012 or newer, less than 100k miles, and less than $10,000. {I realize that less than $10,000 may seem super cheap to some of you but when you’re paying in cash, it’s A LOT OF MONEY}. We looked in a 50-mile radius but didn’t see anything that seemed like a super great deal to us.
We went back and forth, weighing the pros and cons of repairing vs. buying. In the end we decided to fork out the $1,900 to have the work done and keep our van running well longer.
Basically we bought time. Time to save more for our van. Time to find the van that’s just right for us at the right price. It’s out there and it’ll be ready when we are.
Yes, I actually believe that’s how things work and I can prove it when I talk about our used car purchase experiences in next week’s blog post.
In the end I don’t think either one was the better choice. We just made the best choice for our family.
That’s what this journey in marriage started out as, right? We decided that the best choice for our family’s future was to get our butts out of debt ASAP.
It took five hard years but we did it. So can you!
