The car story

I cheated. I told this story to CG the day we were going to pick up our new car. I simply edited the chat and posted it below for the rest of you. My apologies..but that's kinda the week or so I've had. CG, I PROMISE to post something new to you soon!


Ok..so, a couple of weeks ago Jon made a comment "Uh..we need more space" while packing things into our car

while we manage just fine, every once in a while we feel that and he can't ride in the passenger seat with the car seat behind it for any length of time..he's too tall.

We knew we wanted to head in that (an SUV) direction one day...one day we will have more kids and that means more stuff for more people...

when we bought our red car, it was so fast, and we did an odd loan thing called a smartbuy. it gave us a couple of options, basically like a lease to own..needing to keep in under a certain number of miles in order to be able to trade it in after a certain number of years...the end of the "years" is next Feb and the end of the miles is in 800 miles...not good.

so, i kept thinking about it...and i went online to our local saturn dealership to see what they had for cars online...see for any specials, etc.

I saw this category "$250 and below $0 down" Intrigued...I looked. I saw this VUE (small SUV) that was 10,000 less miles than our car, one year older under this category. (we pay $290/mo)

I thought....could it really happen that we could pay less and get a better bigger car?

(the big X factor is of course the loan we were signed into)

so I talked to Jon

he really didn't think it could work, but we decided, the more we looked over our loan paperwork for the red car, to go and ask some questions, even if a new car couldn't work, get some things straight about our current situationso we went. We drove that SUV we saw

at first when we came down the the money talk, it was "you can't fold in anything from your current loan and you'd need to put $1,000 down"...much nicer than that, but still...it didn't seem like it would work

Jon basically said "I'm ok sitting on this car and just keep paying it off till it's ours. We really don't have the money to put down"

so he goes and talks to his manager. He comes back (after a couple times) and takes $1,000 off the car and finds out that we can that we can roll the "leftover" of the current loan (what they would take for the trade in vs. what we still owed) into a new loan...plain and simple, pay this amount till it's paid off....that amount was 291.32 (some random amount of change)...AAAHHH $1 more than what we pay now...IF we could put $500 down.....Closer....

then he asked "have you paid your February loan payment yet?

"no..."

"You can use that for a big part of your "down payment" and we can defer your first payment for the SUV for 45 days...not be due until mid march"

AAAHHHHH

That's when Jon realized this was actually going to work!!!

So..now we're basically at one more dollar a month and $200 to pay off for the down payment...then!

they said they'd call and make sure our financing would be ok'd by the bank...supposed to be the next morning, the guy ran out after us and said "We heard from the bank..You got approved!"

the next morning, I called our insurance agent...to find out how this would change our premium

she called me back and said "I have good news"

"I upped your coverage, cuse you have a little one now right?"

"With that, it'll be $100 LESS a year"

...so now (in effect) we are paying $100 and an extra $2 a month for a bigger car, lower milage, and out of that weird loan thing

Jon has to keep my old silver car, which works fine (other than it leaks through the sunroof when it rains, but we've never had it looked at or fixed)

So, we're getting our new SUV (standard and has a sunroof which is the ONLY thing I missed about my silver car) in 2 hours!


We have our new car and I'm back to driving a standard!