2 Cars to 1 Car to No Car? Redefining “Financial Crisis”

Unlike most of America – we have no car payments.

And we love it.

We keep an emergency fund of $1,000 for car repairs. And we use it. Lately we use it a lot.

Over the summer we drained it – more than once. Lately, we’ve been replacing batteries, alternators, air conditioning compressors, starters in our old 1990s wheels.

We accepted there will be no more air conditioning in our van and Thank the Good Lord winter is coming cause 103 East Texas heat and humidity is like unto hell.

Our second commuter car kept dying for no reason. We don’t know the reason and we’re tired of sinking money into a piece of crap car to find out the reason.

My theory lately is that they make cars to be a lot more disposable than they used to.

Car makers used to believe Americans would drive a car for 30 years since they cost so much money. They figured out they were wrong about that and stopped making such good cars. Now, they make cars to last about 10 years. That’s my theory having driven a great deal of used cars. The ones not made in the 1990s were more reliable and easier to fix.

That or I was a lot more tolerant about push-starting my stick shift.

We live in a small town and just decided – hey, we can really walk or ride our bikes to almost everywhere we need to go and I work from home. We really have other things we need to do with our money. Not the least of which is save money for a more reliable car.

We’ll just one-car it for a while. It will be fun.

Then our van broke down.

No car-ing it isn’t really viable. We will have to borrow cars from kind relatives. We’ll have to bum way too many rides – which seemed to be a way cooler thing to do in my 20s, but with the addition of 2 kids and their car seats it seems like a big imposition now.

People will start to pity us. Which is such a shame, because I pity them for having the burden of car payments.

Why don’t we – like millions of Americans just go finance a car? As if this is some Major Financial Emergency? Everybody else is doing it, why not us?

If I had one single explanation for the cause of the international financial crisis we’re facing today I would say it’s, “Everybody else is doing it.”

Everybody bought more home than they could afford.

But, they shouldn’t have.

(Except it wasn’t everybody. It was just a lot of bodies. And those lot of bodies really impacted the entire world in a profoundly negative way.)

Something in my DNA tells me that if we skip groceries for the next two weeks to pay for this $300 car repair and keep on saving our money there will be a whole lot of cars – nice financed 2000ish cars – on the market at rock bottom prices.

I’ve got my eye on a van with double doors and working air conditioning with no car payment.

Check out my friend Jen’s Cash Car 101 at jlogged.com. She’s a money-saving guru.

Photo Source: Empowering Girls: So Sioux Me