Beating Broke

Personal Finance from the Broke Perspective

Car Trouble Part 5: Finale

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It’s been a couple of months since I last updated this series.  You can go back and read the preceding 4 parts if you like. (part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4)  The basic summary is this.  One of our cars blew it’s timing belt and royally messed up the inside of the engine.  We decided to rebuild the engine, and amongst all that fun, we bought another car and were left with a third car that we really, really, didn’t need any longer.  When I ended part 4, I enthusiastically wrote that we might soon be done with the whole fiasco.  Boy was that wishful thinking.  Here’s how it all wrapped up.

The folks that had looked at it and were excited about buying it couldn’t.  Terrible credit would be my guess.  (All the more reason to brush up on improving your credit score.)  In any case, we never heard back from them.  According to the research I’d done, the car was worth about $4100, and we had it listed at what we thought was a fair price of $3500.  Not a premium, but what we thought was enough of a discount to make it attractive.  Unfortunately, that wasn’t necessarily true.

HDR chevyWe got plenty of calls by just parking the car in a well traffic-ed lot and even a few offers.  The best of them was $2800.  We just weren’t ready to let it go for that price.  We owned the car, so we weren’t paying a dime to keep it, besides registration, and insurance. Registration is fixed, and the car was older.  We’ve been around the insurance bit before and made sure to get a good insurance quote comparison.  So, neither is very expensive.  So we had the numbers on our side to hold on to it and not let it go for a ridiculous amount.  The best, in a funny-ha-ha sense, offer we got was to trade the car for two snowmobiles.  It probably wasn’t a terrible deal, but what am I going to do with two snowmobiles?

So, the car sat.  And sat.  And sat.  For four months, it sat.  And, to be completely honest, I was ready to get rid of it.  It was just one more thing that was floating around out there that needed to be finished off.  So, I expanded the net.  I posted the car on a couple of free internet classifieds sites.  A couple of weeks later, I got a couple of phone calls.  And, some wheeling and dealing later, some folks came down and bought the car for their daughter in college.

We ended up taking $3000 for it.  Much less than we would have liked, but our desire to get it off of our books overrode our desire to get that extra bit of money out of it.  We could have probably held out for the larger amount and maybe gotten it if we had wanted to hold on to the car for a longer period of time.  We were on the verge of a storage issue though.  Whether we like it or not, it’s going to eventually snow, and then it would have to be moved from where it was parked and brought back home.  Where we would have to move it as often as it snowed so that the plows could come through to plow the road.  Inconvenient to say the least.

We’re glad to have it gone.  We’ll use the money from it to pay off the loan we had to take to pay for the rebuilding of the engine on the other car.  That’ll take care of that payment and get us back on track with our debt repayment.  Even with our less than aggressive plan that we’ll be going back to, the numbers look good.  We’ll be debt free with the exception of Mortgage and student loans sometime in 2013.  Two years seems like a long time, but considering we started this journey over 5 years ago, it’s just a drop in the bucket.

Here’s to hoping that wraps up the car trouble for the immediate future!

photo credit: Brian Johhnson

Car Trouble Part 4: Almost Done

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If you need to catch up (It’s been since early March since the last update) here are parts 1, 2, and 3.  And this, this is part 4.  And yes, there is likely to be at least a part 5.

When we last left off, we had bought the suburban, and the other car had yet to even have the motor torn down to see what was wrong with it.

We finally got an estimate and gave the go-ahead to work on the engine of the Alero.  It came back at about what we thought it was going to be.  And the grand total of about $3400 was pretty close too.  It’s a pretty large number, but we breathed a small sigh of relief for no more surprises there.  In order to pay for the repairs, we had to take a new loan out on the Alero.  We owned the Alero in full, so it kinda sucks having to take the title in and sign paperwork for a loan on a car that you used to own.  On the other hand, it’s nice to have that asset to use when needed.  Imagine what the result could have been if we had still owed on the car!

Fixing the CarWe’ve also taken a couple of longish trips with the suburban.  And with the price of gas, we’ve felt every mile of them.  But, for those trips, the necessity is there.  We’ve now taken two trips that have included the whole family, even the dog.  It’s pretty nice to not have to try and find someone to watch the dog while we’re gone, or to find a kennel for him while we’re away.  In the case of the kennel, the extra cost in gas easily pays for itself.  We’ll be taking a long trip next month to see my parents.  It’s well over 900 miles from here, and it generally takes us a full day (with a motel room in the middle) to get there.  We’ll take the dog with us.  I’m sure the savings on kennel won’t overcome the extra cost of gas on this trip, but it will still be nice to have him with us.  Aside from a few pangs of regret when I fill it up, I’m glad we ended up getting the Suburban.  And, even the gas isn’t that bad, it’s just that the tank is twice as large as either of our cars’ tanks.  It adds up so much quicker.

Since we have the Alero back, and it works, it’s time to thin the herd.  We’ve decided to sell the Cavalier.  Based on what it books out for, we think we should be able to get enough out of it to pay off the loan we took on the Alero.  If that happens, we’ll be back to owning the Alero outright again, which will be nice.  We’ll still have a payment on the Suburban, but it’s worth the upgrade.  We haven’t listed the Cav just yet, but put a big sign in it’s window and then parked it at the parking lot at work.  The parking lot has wonderful frontage to the main intersection in town and can’t be beat, since I don’t have to pay to park there.

Surprise.  We parked the Cavalier there Friday night.  Today, (Sunday) I went and showed it to a couple who liked it.  They’ll be going to the bank tomorrow, and as long as they can get the financing to buy the car, they think they’ll take it.  If all of that goes through, it could be nearly the shortest sale time of a car ever!  I guess we priced it right!

Hopefully, we’ll find out whether they are going to take the car tomorrow, and if they do, be able to pay off the loan on the Alero on Tuesday.  With that puzzle piece out of the way, and barring any unforeseen other car issues, that could set us up for the final installment of the car trouble series later this week!  I can only hope!

photo credit: dawnmichele

Car Trouble Part 3: Not Quite the End

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I was hoping that when I wrote this third part of the recent car troubles series (part 1 and part 2), that it would be the last of them for a long while.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like the car karma is with us on that.  On the bright side, it doesn’t appear that anything has gotten any worse.  Before I get too far ahead of myself, let me just tell you what’s been going on.

Shortly after I wrote and posted part 2 of the car trouble series, my employer (a Credit Union), came into possession of a Suburban.  The astute reader will realize that for a credit union to come into possession of a car means that it is was  repossession.  When they have repos, they generally open them up to public bidding to try and
get rid of them.  After a lot of careful deliberation and even more careful number crunching, my wife and I decided that we would be remiss in not bidding on the Suburban if we could get a good deal on it.  It’s got 135,000 miles on it, but we’ve talked to several Suburban owners who have seen theirs drive 200,000 miles.  The retail value on it was just under $9000.  We decided that we would go to $6500.  If we couldn’t get it for that, we’d let it go.

A sign of the timesI feel that I should explain some of our rational for deciding to purchase (or attempt to purchase) the vehicle.  We are a family of four.  We also have a large Golden Retriever.  The cars that we currently own are a Chevy Cavalier, and an Oldsmobile Alero.  Neither of those will allow for taking the entire family, dog included, anywhere.  If we want to go anywhere with the dog along, we have to take both cars, or not go at all.  That particular problem doesn’t arise often, but it does arise.  The second problem is that as the kids get bigger, so do their needs for luggage space.  It’s already gotten to the point where we can’t go anywhere for more than a night or two and still get away with everything fitting in the smaller Cavalier.  A larger vehicle has been on our wish list for a while, but we haven’t been able to justify the cost or afford the payments, considering that most of the reliable ones all cost somewhere around $9-10,000 at a car dealership.  So, we figured that if we can get the Suburban for $6500 or less, we could make it work.

The final day for the bidding on the Suburban came around, and it was fast and furious.  For several hours, I was responding to either an email or a text message with the new high bid in it, and raising our bid if needed.  The price edged closer and closer to the $6500 mark and eventually passed it.  And as it did, I dropped out of the bidding.  With just me and one other bidder involved at that point, the other bidder won the auction at $6600.  It stunk, but we set a mark and stuck with it.  We were disappointed that we couldn’t get it, but sometimes that’s just the way it works.

Fast forward a couple of days.  I get an email from one of the collections officers.  The high bidder decided he couldn’t afford the vehicle and backed out.  If I still wanted it, it was mine.  I quickly called my wife to double-double check that it was still a go and then emailed him back to tell him that we’d take it.  The best part?  Because the high bidder backed out, I got it for the price of the first bid that outbid the other (3rd) bidder who dropped out at $5600.  Final price, we paid?  $5690.  After the loan paperwork was all taken care of, and about $100 was added to the total of the loan for licensing and a bit more for tax, the total of the loan was just a hair over $6100.  As a reminder, the retail value on this car is about $8900.  Even if I decided to just sell it, I would likely come out ahead.  I don’t intend to sell it, but I could if I wanted to and smell like roses afterward.

With the addition of this vehicle, we also decided to sell one of the cars to help offset the cost of the rebuilt motor in the Alero.  We’ll end up selling the Cavalier, simply because it is the smallest of the bunch and least likely to be able to transport our growing family as time goes on.  I suppose I should update you on the rebuilt motor too, as that continues to be a bit of an adventure.  We still don’t know how much it is going to cost.  Why?  Because, in the several weeks that the mechanic has had the car, they haven’t been able to tear the motor apart to assess the damage.  They’ve got a trouble car that’s in the queue in front of us, and until that car is done, they don’t have the mechanics to spare to work on ours.  Because we bought the Suburban, not having the other car hasn’t really been an issue.  If we hadn’t done that though, we’d be looking at more carpooling or a rental car.  I’m sure insurance would have picked up some of the rental, but not all of it.  And the carpooling only works on certain days.  It would have been difficult to be sure.

There you have it.  Our car troubles haven’t gotten any worse.  And, you could argue that the Suburban part actually makes it a bit better (I would).  But, the car troubles certainly aren’t entirely resolved either.  Hopefully, I’ll be able to write part 4 soon and maybe one last closing part on selling a used car too!

photo credit: M Glasgow