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car ownership


  

342 members have voted

  1. 1. car ownership

    • own our car/s outright
      245
    • have loans out on at least one car
      92
    • I don't have a car
      0
    • other
      5
    • Look a flying pig
      0


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Dh just bought a car a few weeks ago. We traded in his Envoy for it since gas is so high now. The notes plus gas on his new Abarth is less than what we were paying for the gas in the Envoy. I have a 2007 Prius that has been paid off for about 3 or 4 years.

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I am weird about cars. After having a few clunkers in my early years and being stranded I am TERRIFIED of being stuck with a car full of kids. I lease my honda odyssey and will continue to do so. I need to know that I have a reliable and newer car to trust in. DH just got a 2013 Altima to replace his old one that was paid off. It is a 2006 with 125K miles on it and DS 17 inherited it. I "thought" we were going to go with the more economical Scion TC which is made by Toyota.....but since he commutes so far and makes all the money who was I to argue.

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Most of my cars have been junky hand me downs or paid for in cash privately. I can't afford a car payment.

 

I've had an 87 grand am. Transmission went.

 

87 Honda civic (bought for $700 and drove it to Georgia from NY the next day). Ex boyfriend rear ended an SUV and fried the electrical.

 

85 K-5 Chevy blazer. I loved my truck! But it had too many problems. It was lifted with 33" tires and a flat meant i had to borrow a friend's house jack to lift it. Everything under the hood was pieced together, so when something failed, I had to first figure out which model it came from.

 

95 Altima. I was hit the day after i bought it and sold it.

 

94 Saturn. Clutch went.

 

My current 19yo Camry was doing well, but three really cold winters and over 200,000 miles has worn it out. All these "little" repairs are killing me.

 

I wish I was able to have more reliable cars, but it is what it is.

 

Eta: I'm saving for an SUV or minivan.

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FOr about five years, we had cars we owned outright. Then one of my kids totaled my car. That was a car I was supposed to give to another kid and then get a newer car. We did that anyway with a replacement car and now we have one car we own outright and one we pay off. We could pay it off outright but I would rather have the savings and investments right now.

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We have bought new and paid off loans early (2 years). Then we keep the vehicle for at least 10 years. I had a 1990 Taurus for 11 years. Now, we have an 11 year old Forester, a 13 year old dodge caravan which became unreliable a few months back and not is not running at all. Dh doesn't want to get rid of the minivan for some reason. We have a 2004 Prius that mil gave us recently. She wanted a new car and she's given 2 cars each to his sisters so she thought it was our turn.

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We've always paid cash. Some have been older cars that were cheap; and sometimes a new van that we saved up for and then kept for years and years.

 

At times we've had 3 cars so we upped the odds of having 2 in working condition at any one time. That strategy depends on having a place to park an extra car, and a place to work on it.

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I bought my first car when I was 18yo. From that time until I was 38yo I had either a payment on a loan or a lease for a car and we switched out for a new car every three years.

 

Then we moved here and it is nearly impossible to get a car loan here for expats. Everyone buys inexpensive vehicles partly because you HAVE to buy them outright and partly because the traffic here is so awful that you play bumper cars all day and your car has scratches and dings all over it.

 

I have been without a car payment for 3.5 years and I really do like it. But I miss having a really nice mini-van.

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Currently our vehicles are owned-outright because they are paid off. However, getting vehicle loans is normal for us, and I do not consider it unwarranted debt.

 

It's good when the car outlasts the loan by 100% at least, because it gives a chance of doing something good with the money during those no-payment years and/or making payments on only 1of 2 vehicles at a time.

 

In about 2 years we will replace our pickup truck. We might save up a lump in advance, but probably will be taking a 2 to 5 year loan on it.

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We pay cash for our cars. We buy used ones and try to find those that are relatively new with low mileage. dh is driving an older Honda Accord with over 200K miles on it right now. I am driving a 6YO Toyota Sienna with over 80K. We will likely keep driving these until they become unreliable.

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We own clunkers but dh does all repairs and rebuilds on them. In 2007 my dad gave his 1995 minivan and dh just got finished rebuilding the engine in our driveway. I think that van has about 190,000 miles on it. The transmission was done a couple of years ago.

 

The car I drive is a 1998 Olds Aurora (high end when it was new) which we bought for $1K about 5 years ago with a big dent in the side and it had 146,000 miles on it :). Dh has kept that thing running pretty well. He just spent some time at the junkyard picking up a few parts for it.

 

We have no plans (or way) to replace these anytime soon so I hope they last a while longer.

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We owned all of our cars outright until last year when our best vehicle was totaled by someone slamming into the back. We could have bought another clunker for cash, but we had been seeing our mechanic on a weekly basis for a long time, so we decided to buy something newer that seats 8 with a loan.

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I'm like delaney - I worry a lot about the reliability of junkers. Growing up that was all we had and they caused so many problems. We had one where the axle broke while it was being driven, another with no floorboard.

 

When dh and I got married we each had a car with a loan. Both were paid off shortly after and we had a few years of no car payments (and reduced insurance). Then my car (Honda Civic with over 160,000 miles) started having a lot of problems, dd was getting old enough to drive, and dh needed a car he could use to take out clients. So now we have Dh's old car - a 2002 Suburban with 180,000 miles that is definitely starting to get all the little constant repairs (and we aren't driving until we can find out why the "Check Engine" light is on), a 2007 Jeep Liberty with a small payment that is dd's car when she is home and she will take to school next year, and a 2012 Honda Accord lease that dh uses as his "company car".

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I have one 2000 Focus. Bought it new with a loan and paid it off within 4 years. So far I've gotten 9 more years out of it. We plan on replacing it this summer with another just because it has become far less reliable and I want some of the fun gadgets I take for granted in our new car. So far, I have 243,000 miles on that car and they are all mine! :)

 

We bought a Lincoln MKX in October. Making payments and we LOVE that car.

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I have a loan on a car that I bought it 2 weeks ago; we haven't even made the first payment yet. LOL We usually buy a car with a loan (only if it is good intererst rate though) and pay it off in a couple of years. We do this to keep our credit score up. Otherwise the only thing we have financed is our house and a cc that we pay off every month.

 

Two years ago, we had the money to pay cash for my son's car but refinanced my car instead to pay for his car. My car was newer then my son's car and it qualified for a 1% the interest rate. The loan's interest was only $79 for a couple of years of payments. I put money we had for the car in an account and had direct withdrawl take car of the payments from there. It was all for our credit score or we would have paid it off when we bought it.

 

Once we pay off a car, we keep it for a long time so car loans are not the norm for us. 4 of our cars, we had 8-10 years and had paid them off in 2 or so years each time.

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We drive our cars into the ground. We try to never have more than one car loan at a time, but we do have two right now because my van just couldn't hang on long enough.

 

3-year note on used Ford Tempo that we shared for several years before dh got his truck - we replaced it with the van when we had our 3rd because it couldn't hold 3 carseats in the back seat.

 

3-year note on dh's truck - He drove it for 16 years and then got a 4-year note on a Honda Fit which will be paid off in April

 

5 year note on my van - I drove it for 14.5 years and then after $1000 of repairs in January and $2000 of repairs in September it needed another $2000 of repairs in October. We dumped it instead of that last $2000 repair and I got a 5-year note on a Hyundai Elantra, so that won't be paid off until 2017. When your car is costing more in repairs than car payments would be, it's time to move on.

 

We usually have 9-10 years of car payments (one car for dh and then one for me when his is paid off) and then 5 years of no payments at all.

 

Both of my vehicles were ending up with scary-high repair bills those last few years and had over 180,000 miles on them. They just weren't built to last that long. I'm hoping our current cars hold up better.

 

So we currently have just one month left on a 4-year note on dh's car and a 5-year note on my car that we got just a few months ago.

 

ETA:

Our 19yo has a car that was given to her by dh's grandmother. It's a 2003 Toyota Camry and had just 12,000 miles on it when she received it. Dh's grandmother lost her sight 5 years ago, so it had been sitting unused in her driveway all that time (dh's aunt would drive it around the block 1x/month just to make sure the tires didn't rot). She gave it to our dd when she moved into a nursing home.

 

And I should also note that dh's old pickup got 20mpg, but the Fit he replaced it with gets 30-34mpg. My van got 12-14mpg, but the Elantra I replaced it with gets 24-26mpg. The difference in gas prices has helped to make up for the added cost of insurance.

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We own our car outright. We bought it right before we moved here with a loan, but we went shopping for the loan first to make sure we could pay it off in 2 years rather than 4 or 6. Our second car was a gift from a leaving friend, and we used it until it bit the dust permanently.

 

Our next car will be paid for in cash. We continue to set aside car payments in savings and dh is getting a raise next month. All that overage will go toward his dream truck in about 3 years.

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In 2009, we were carrying 2 car payments. Then, dh got laid off. Then a drunk driver totalled dh's truck (no one was hurt). It was a blessing. We had enough money from insurance to pay off that loan. And we paid off the van within 6 months of that.

 

We haven't replaced his truck because we were laid off for 16 months. We couldn't qualify for a loan if we had wanted to. And he got a job that he has a work truck. We still borrow my mom's vehicle on occassion, less than once a month.

 

We will try to pay cash next time. Our van was the only time we bought a brand new vehicle. I wanted to feel that "I'm not taking on anyone else's headaches" feeling. I wanted to know where every stain came from, just once. I got my experience. We will buy used next time.

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Early in our marriage we had loans and new cars every few years. But dh's car was having repairs monthly and he had a 45 min commute one way and I was driving him and the kids(babies then) back and forth all day. It was awful. We traded both in and got 2 new cars to accommodate the fact we were upside down on the loans of our cars at that point. But we knew how bad it had become and we have owned these cars for a few years now outright. I don't like the repairs and maintenance costs and we know we need to buy another car soon so we don't end up with both dying and needing to be replaced one day. I hope to drive mine to 200K miles. Dh needs more power for his commute so we hope next winter to buy a car for him. We haven't decided about keeping his paid off car for ds or to sell.

 

Right now we can't afford a car payment. So I am thankful we finally paid them off. And I really don't want to have a payment again!

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The one and only new car we've ever bought in our 15 year marriage we had to take a small 2 year loan to bridge the gap between when we had originally planned to replace our previous car and when we actually needed to. We looked at less expensive cars but my dad pointed out that as neither of us had taken out student loans for college and hadn't ever had any other sort of debt that taking the car loan and paying it off as promised would help our credit score for when we eventually wanted to get a mortgage. Better to pay a small amount of interest on the car loan than thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars more on a mortgage with a higher interest rate. We paid the loan off in about a year and it did help raise our credit score.

 

When we go to replace that car (it's now 10 years old), we hopefully should be able to buy the next one in cash (knock on wood that we don't need to dip into that savings for an emergency).

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i bought cheap used cars until i married this dh. our last 2 cars we took money out of our home equity line but then we refinanced both mortgages and paid it down some . . . so i said no, we dont owe money on the cars. but it is slightly fuzzy

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We have 3 cars. We own all of them outright and have for about 7 years.

 

We will be getting another car in about 2 years or so. We are paying a car payment equivalent into our savings account and hope to have at least half the cost saved up.

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Dh just bought a car a few weeks ago. We traded in his Envoy for it since gas is so high now. The notes plus gas on his new Abarth is less than what we were paying for the gas in the Envoy. I have a 2007 Prius that has been paid off for about 3 or 4 years.

 

That's what we did almost five years ago. We bought a commuting vehicle for DH, and the gas plus the car payment was still cheaper than gas for commuting with his truck. We paid the loan off in three years, though. We had to keep the truck for hauling firewood, but we don't use it very often. We also have my van, fully paid for. So, three vehicles, all fully paid for, but none of them have less than 150K miles on them (his commuting car is actually getting a new engine because that was cheaper than buying a replacement; fuel-efficient small cars are really expensive these days), and none of them are worth very much.

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his commuting car is actually getting a new engine because that was cheaper than buying a replacement; fuel-efficient small cars are really expensive these days

 

 

We did that with our car last summer. Buying a new car at that point was out because of uncertainty at his job (his employer had eliminated his position and he was scrambling to find another internal one before the deadline) and we couldn't get any kind of decent used vehicle for the cost of the engine replacement. Knock on wood, we're hoping to get another 50k-100k miles out of the car.

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We had paid off cars for several years, then my Camry died. The repairs were much more than it was worth, so we donated it to charity. We had one vehicle for a year. Waking up early on a cold winter morning to take dh to the Metro station was not fun. We saved during that year, so when we did buy a used minivan in Dec, we had a good chunk to put down and the loan is not too bad. It is worth having the loan to finally have 2 vehicles again.

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In 2007 we paid cash for a 2005 Toyota Camry. That's our car. 135K for miles at this point. We don't do car loans and we don't have 2 cars. Too much gas, too much insurance and too much hassle. If we both need to get somewhere by car, one of us drops the other off. We will drive this till it is totally gone and then buy another vehicle with cash. The only scenario I can see us getting 2 cars is if we have a another child or two and want a minivan and then we would get a tiny, old beater to save on gas mileage when we don't have a full van of passengers. I can't see us financing a car because we are debt averse. I'd drive a 1995 Toyota Corolla before I'd sign the line on a car note.

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we have always bought our cars outright. Cars are very expensive in Australia, even secondhand ones. Our newest car is over 20 years old. we paid $9000 for it 3 years ago. ( Toyota commuter bus looks like this http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/2004-TOYOTA-HIACE-COMMUTER-BUS-AA71PZ-/230944900194?pt=AU_Trucks_Commercial_Vehicles&hash=item35c5638462)

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I voted that our cars are paid for. We havent had a payment in 10 years, BUT I'm about to join the car payment ranks again because our next vehicle will cost over 20k. This is a bargain because a car came on the market recently that saves us from spending 50k on a comparable vehicle that suits our needs. ugggggghhhhh.

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