Money Matters

For most of our married life Sarah and I haven't always made the smartest money decisions. In fact we've bought some pretty questionable things. One thing that I have always struggled with wanting new is vehichles. I have several vehicles and several nice vehicles. Two years ago I bought the first car I've owned which I can truly say has everything I could want and more and I really like. It was our 2004 Lincoln Aviator. A couple of weeks ago I took it in to Ricks Autmotive to get it looked at on a couple of issues. Mainly brakes and rotors and the transmission was shifting hard at times. They reccomended about $5,000 worth of work which included a new transmission. That's the second time I've taken a transmission issue there and have them try and sell me a new transmission. They did do a transmission flush and it's working completely fine now so I'm convinced maybe I didn't need that. Anway when we were trying to figure out what to do with the car, whether to sink money into or ditch it and buy a new car or ditch it and buy a used car some fleet vehicles came up for auction at my work. At the end of it we were able to buy a newer model, high mileage, extremely well maintained mini van and pay cash for it. We are hoping to sell the Aviator for what we owe on it and eliminate a car payment! (Getting it sold is a God send and the person helping us with it is truly a friend, one who you know will help you when you need it, those are hard to come by!) It's amazing though how we went from thinking we had to find $5,000 fast and get it fixed to deciding to trade "down" and elminate a car payment, even though I'm more and more convinced it only needed new brakes and rotors but that's another story. All in all the whole thing has taught us a lot about what is important in life. It seems like our society has become extremely spoiled with wanting the latest and greatest and that includes me at times. I've learned a lot through this, even though the canker sores from worrying are about to take me down.

Tonight I cleaned out the Aviator and took it to the car wash and vacumed and washed it all myself. Part of me was tempted to take it to Auto Magic but besides saving the money there was some satisfaction in doing it myself. (This is sounding so very strange even to me...) Sarah's agreed to drive the mini van but is struggling a little bit with becoming a mini van girl. I think she'll like it after a while and I really think we'll like it on long road trips. Don't tease her too much about it.

This was the first post of the 30 posts in June I talked about earlier. I'm hoping to spend some time on the blog this month and get it redesigned.

Until tomorrow...