Decisiontime said:
“Not here to argue the issues again, just seeking concrete suggestions for handling impasses.”
I will give a recent illustration from real life. Forgive the TMI–this example will include graphic information about a real life financial situation, but I don’t think it makes a lot of sense without that. I’m a little bit fuzzy on some of the chronology, but you’ll get the general idea.
We are a somewhat house poor and private school tuition poor upper-middle class family with three kids, driving a $2,000 car. We have just the one car, but can generally get by with just it. Unfortunately, the car has been having more and more mechanical problems. We are trying to save for a minivan, but much of the $200 a month we are saving for that keeps getting sucked into repairs. In the past month, it was emitting this horrible burnt oil smell and we had to take it to the mechanic (there turned out to be leaking brake fluid that we had fixed, plus a slow oil leak that we didn’t bother with, as it’s expensive to fix and the car isn’t worth it) and we had to beg rides to school for the kids and a ride to the grocery store until it was taken care of. On Wednesday, my husband had to beg for a jump at CCD and we got a new battery. At that point, we agreed that we should get a minivan in the summer, by which time we should have enough money to get a nice one (we’re thinking a 2009 or 2010 Kia Sedona, probably in the $14k-$16k range). That was all nicely settled and then on Saturday we to beg for a jump from a guy at a barber shop. My husband got the car to the mechanic’s (keeping the engine running the whole time to make sure it stayed on) and they replaced the starter. The car is now starting much better, but they said not to take any long trips without first replacing the alternator. My husband’s idea was, let’s replace the alternator and then we can stick to our plan of buying a new-to-us minivan in the summer, when we are expecting a bonus.
As you can imagine, after all this drama of begging rides for the kids and begging jumps for the car from complete strangers and having my husband spend hours and hours the day of a child’s birthday waiting around the mechanic’s and having no idea if the car is going to start or just leave us stranded or late for school or whatever, I was totally done. I yelled and yelled and yelled about it. My husband was puzzled–hadn’t I previously agreed that we would wait until the summer to buy a minivan? Wasn’t that the plan? I yelled some more and said we needed to go to the KIA dealership RIGHT NOW, as summer is another 8 months away and heaven only knows how many mechanical issues we’ll have between now and then.
The problem is that we have only about $23k in liquid funds in the bank. That is enough to cover a new-to-us minivan, but we want to buy something nice that will last a long time but feel deeply uncomfortable without at least $10k in the bank (and more would be nice). Also, we’ll probably need to arrange to drive around 100 miles to a dealership that has what we want, a very daunting prospect with our current car issues. We can probably get $2000 as a trade-in and we’ve got about $500 in our car savings fund and some relatives may be able to help, so we’re getting very close to being able to cover the purchase without creating a bad situation for us if we have some other major household emergency. (There would be taxes on top of the price that we need to bear in mind, plus higher insurance costs.)
I eventually cooled down. My husband agreed that we would go to the KIA dealership today and we did. We had a good look at the KIA Sedona minivan and were happy with it. We also hope to see a Mazda5, but I think we both lean toward the Sedona, as it’s bigger.
Our current plan is:
- My husband will try to switch out the alternator.
- We will nurse the old car along and try to hold out on buying a minivan until the summer.
- However, we will also be watching Craigslist and seeing if anything affordable shows up.
So, it sounds kind of like my husband “won,” but I also finally got him to go to the dealership (he’d been dragging his feet), we were able to decide that the Sedona would be right for us, he wrote his parents explaining the situation, and he wants me to watch Craigslist for a deal. Objectively, I suppose not much has changed, but I feel a lot better about the situation and I think we’ll probably manage reasonably well until we can get a new car. I needed for us to go to the dealership to feel like we were making progress, rather than just sitting on our thumbs waiting for the next crisis to come along.
The process is not perfect (the perfect family would have gotten to the same place with less yelling), but I feel reasonably happy about what we’ve done about the situation, even though not much has changed.
