Wordy Wednesday

New car.

Well, new to us. It’s actually a 2001 Miata & we are the 3rd owners.

DH has been talking about getting a new car when the mini van is paid off for a little over a year now. His F150 truck is sort of overkill for daily commuting & at 13MPG it’s damn expensive as well. Plus, since he had the truck it was more or less expected he use it to haul equipment for work when he drove off to climb towers or when stuff needed to be transported from one place to another. He did it originally because it was convenient for him but at some point they just started assuming he would do it.

Oh, they’d reimburse him for gas eventually but not for wear & tear and the thing about credit cards is they don’t expect payment ‘eventually’. For some outlandish reason they expect it on the due date & have the gall to charge you late fees if you don’t pay them on that date.

And we were never reimbursed for late fees. Apparently we should just suck up that additional $125 or more in gas that month, because we’d get it back eventually.

Plus, at 13MPG the reimbursement was not actually covering the cost of gas.

But now he can barely haul a gallon of milk so they’ll have let him take one of the work vans if he or equipment need to be elsewhere.

Ha!

My van wasn’t actually due to be paid off for another 3 months but this was the exact car with all the exact features he had been looking for. He was able to talk the guy down $700 & get a loan that covered this car, plus the money still owed on mine & the payments ended up being $30 less than our current ones, which just offsets the additional $28 a month charge on the car insurance. It’s a 3 year loan, at which point we’ll have had the van for 7 years and it will be 10 years old, which is about when we were planning on replacing it.

He’s going to be selling his motorcycle as well, which will knock a few payments off the length of the loan.

And we’re saving about $100 a month in gas costs, not including eventually reimbursed work related ones.

So it all works out.

He still has the truck. We do sometimes need to haul things that don’t fit in the van, like soil or gravel, but it will no longer be in regular use.

The Miata is very low to the ground. It feels like you are riding in a roller skate.

That will take some getting used to.