I don't like cars, nope, not one teeny tiny bit. They are a waste of money in my opinion and if America wasn't set up in such a way that you practically need to own one unless you're living in a very large city with awesome public transportation, I wouldn't.
Don't get me wrong, there are definitely things about them that are convenient. But, in most cases, they're just money pits.
We own a Jeep Liberty and have had it for just a little over 2 years. We've had terribly luck with cars in our 4 years of marriage and this is our 3rd main vehicle that we've own. We recently scaled back to one vehicle and I love it. I love that we are not only saving ourselves one car payment a month, we're also not having to pay for insurance and car repairs on it. Sometimes it's not always convenient, but we make it work. Kyle owns a moped that he rides to and from work when the weather is nice. That was cheap to buy, is cheap to maintain and gets like 40 miles to the gallon.
Okay, so here's the dilemma. We're having a second child in March and we only own a 5 passenger vehicle. So, once the baby comes, if we have 2 people fly in to visit us, we can't carry everybody in one vehicle. I just don't feel like "resetting" our car payment right now and we can't afford anything in cash that would reliable enough for us. I'm all about owning "newer" vehicles to alleviate a lot of unnecessary car repairs. Our Jeep is 2003, so it's 5 years old, so if we bought and sold, I'd want to buy something more like a 2005. But, that puts any type of 7 passenger van at around $12-14k on the low end for a decent brand.
Our Jeep will be paid for in 2 years, if not sooner if we decide to pay it off with some of our savings. It's hard to live without car payments, but I don't want to have car payments any more.
Ugh...I'm just ranting. I don't know what we should do. It's always such pain to deal with cars and I HATE dealerships. HATE HATE HATE HATE them! So, I really don't want to go there, which means everything would have to be independent. We'd have to sell our Jeep independently and then we'd have to find an independent buyer and sometimes that can be scary.
I don't know what to do.