Savings, schmavings. Here's to our new car!

Apparently we don't think we need a savings account, because every time we start really building one up, we end up needing to buy something big.  Last year's example was a house.  This week's example is a car.  But I guess it's for things like this that we have the savings account in the first place...

We knew that Nate's car, which he drives about 50 miles round trip every day, was going to need to be replaced sometime in the near future.  It was a 2004 Ford Focus, so it was about 10 years old(depending on when it was first purchased), and had 130,000 miles on it.  And it was starting to have problems.  In the past couple of years we have had a few $1000+ repairs on it, along with some that were more in the couple-of-hundred-dollar range.  We've always fixed it and moved on.  Well, last Friday or Saturday the car started smoking and making a noise.  Nate thought the AC compressor was going out, and he was right.  We took it in and found out that it was going to cost $800-$900 to fix and, totally unrelated, the water pump had a slow leak and would need future attention.

We knew that on a good day, with everything in the car working, we would only be able to sell it for maybe $2000.  So, instead of fixing the car, we decided to call it quits and just trade it in and get a new car.  We had hoped to wait until the new year to start shopping around for another car, but decided now was going to have to be the time because we couldn't justify the expense to fix the car when we could use that money on a newer one.  And the dealership ended up giving us $500 for it as a trade in.  So, it ended up breaking us almost even with what we could have sold it for, after paying for the repair, without the hassle of actually having to find someone to buy it.

On Saturday, we drove into Tucson at dinnertime/bedtime to go car shopping with all four kids in tow.  In case you are wondering, it was as super fun as it sounds.  We got some ideas, then came home.  Then on Monday, after the kids got home from their first day of school, we took the three oldest kids over to a neighbors house (we kept Arie with us) so we could hopefully go purchase something.  But this time, we went to the local Jim Click dealership here in Green Valley instead of driving in to all the ones on the automall.  They even brought one of the cars down from Tucson that we had been looking at so we could test drive it.  We didn't end up getting that one though.  We stopped considering it the minute we found out it didn't have cruise control.  It was a 2012 automatic car, with no cruise control!  The salesman told us that cruise control doesn't actually come standard on a lot of cars.  I couldn't believe that.  It seems so crazy!  Who voluntarily wants a car with no cruise control?

Anyway, we ended up with a 2012 Ford Focus SEL with 22,800 miles.  If you can't tell from the picture, it is a dark silver charcoal color.  I don't know the actual name of the color.  And I think Nate is having fun with all of the extra features the SEL (as opposed to the more standard SE) model has.

It was a little more than we were wanting to spend (aren't they always?), but it had half as many miles as the other cars we were considering for only about $1500 more.  Lower mileage was the one thing we were willing to pay a bit more for, since Nate will be putting so many miles on it.  And then we ended up paying to extend the warrantee, which is something we never do.  But our Costco membership made it almost half price.  So, for about $1000 we were able to extend the manufacturer's warrantee of 3 yrs or 36,000 miles to 5 yrs or 100,000 miles.  The warrantee will pay for basically anything that ever needs to be fixed, except for things like tires and breaks.  With all the car repairs we have paid for in the past several years, we figured the extra money would be worth the peace of mind of knowing we won't have to pay for any car repairs with this car for a long time.

So there it is.  Now we are feeling the weight of purchasing something so expensive, and hoping we made the right choice.  But at least it's nice to know that Nate is now driving something reliable. 

*As a side note, I haven't even driven this car yet.  We ran out of time when we were purchasing the car (Nate drove it, of course), and Nate has been working so much since that the car hasn't been here at any reasonable time of day for me to take it for a drive.  :)