We Paid off our Car Today!

There isn't a feeling quite like when you pay the final payment on a car loan. The car you bought so long ago is finally YOURS. No more will you have to shell out hundreds of dollars a month for the beast.

DH and I have owned three cars in our lives. The first was the one where we paid our final payment and even got our title in the mail--on a car that was sitting totaled in a junkyard. Yup, DH had gotten into a wreck, and because he'd put so many miles on the car from his pizza delivery job (before we got married), they decided to junk the car because it would cost more to fix it than the car was worth. So we ended up paying car payments on a car we no longer had. How much does that suck?

The next car we owned was a Chevy Sprint, a tiny little thing. But it was our first car as a married couple. We loved it, and we no longer had to ride our bikes everywhere. (My friend Lisa will appreciate that one. LOL) Anyhow, we bought it for $700, and looking back now, I think we were robbed. LOL All in all, the car served it's purpose, until the engine gave out because of this or that and we ended up pushing the darn thing around the block every week, because in L.A., they clean the streets once a week, and if your car is on the street, you'll get like a $20 ticket. Gah. So every week, we'd push the thing around the block. We finally donated it to science...er, I mean some charity. :P

The third car we owned was a Mazda Protege, a 1991 model. We bought it in 1996, so it was only a few years old at the time. We loved that car. But the years passed, and we only owned the thing for about 6 months before we ended up selling it to our friend. He desperately needed a car, and we'd just bought our 15 passenger party van (another story).

In 1998, we bought a Nissan Maxima. Beautiful car, still looks bad ass today. LOL We bought it when it had only 10 miles on the odometer. Black car, black leather interior, seriously an awesome car. This is the car I finally paid off today.

"But Becka," you say, "I did the math and that's *8* years to pay off a car?!?"

"Yes," I answer.

You see, when DH and I bought the car so long ago, we were young and stoopid. We leased it, because we thought in a few years, we'd get another one. But then, the babies started coming, and we didn't have any extra money for a new car. When we moved to Oregon, we decided to buy it, because our lease was up. But unfortunately, not all of our lease payments flip-flopped into the loan that we now had to pay as the purchasers. We still had a substantial balance to pay, around $15-$18 Grand. So for the past few years, we've been paying $413 car payments on a car that we've had for *8* years. Why did we decide to buy this car instead of getting a newer one?

Again, the money issues, and the fact that with the new loan, we'd only have to pay off ballpark $18 Grand for a luxury car as opposed to $35 Grand and up. Besides, the car had been good to us. VERY good. In fact, I'd recommend Nissan Maximas to anyone who was looking for a new car to buy. We recently had to put a little money into it, but that was only due to wear and tear on the car. It is EIGHT years old, after all. :P

So today, my DH got a bonus at his work, and we were able to finally pay the payoff amount, which was about $1600. We finally OWN a beautiful, WORKING car. hehe And we have extra $$ every month.

I'm overjoyed. :)

~~Becka