A couple of week ago, we bought a beater… I didn’t want to buy a beater and my wife is mortified that she even has to drive the thing.  The exhaust is beginning to rust out and is loud.  It has all the standard wear and tear of a 17 year old car.  And it’s butt ugly. Check out these pictures (Side Angle View of the ugly old red beater. , Front Fender ).  We could have “afforded” something else.  We could have been “normal” like everyone else and gotten a car payment. 

But we didn’t.  I guess that makes us weird.  The bottom line for me is that normal in America is broke and if that’s normal then I don’t want to be normal!!

Here’s a quick background on what brought us to this point.  Our family took an extended trip over Christmas and decided to save money by driving.  We took our 1997 Nissan Sentra and headed up North.  About halfway into our trip, the engine just quit.  Died.  Kaput, etc. You get the point.  The mechanic gave us an estimate of around $1400.  The car was worth around $2200-$2500 and so we decided to have it fixed.   There was only one problem; the mechanic determined that the replacement engine was bad.  At this point we’re about 1600 miles from home without a car; my head is spinning and I’m losing it.  My wife is upset and the whole thing situation is just a nightmare.  What does a person do when you are well over a thousand miles from home and no car?  Buy a new car and take on payments, right?  After all there aren’t any other options? Right?!?   NO.

My wife and I made a decision almost three and a half years ago that we were not going to borrow any more money.  Period.  End of story, no discussion allowed.  And now here we are, just over three years into this decision, a long way from home with about three months between us and being debt free except our home.  You can see how we might begin to question the wisdom of that decision.  I have to say I thought about taking on a car payment for all of three seconds.  I remembered how much I hated having the weight of payments on my shoulders.  I also thought about how relaxing and the sense of freedom I had from having the cars paid off.  The decision was quite easy.  NO. 

It’s amazing how creative one has to be when you won’t borrow the money.  Thankfully, we were able to use a car from my mother-in-law (thank you!) to visit my parents and then rented a car to get from Minnesota to Georgia. Side Bar:  Hertz is one of the few places that allows one way rentals.

We then rented a car for the first few weeks of January while we scraped together some money.  We purchased a 1991 Toyota Corolla with 129,000 miles for $1100 dollars.  As you can tell from the pictures it didn’t come off the showroom floor.  It is butt ugly on the outside but seems to be mechanically sound (at least for a 1,000 dollar car).  The best thing is that this car is PAID for.  I don’t have any payments and when we sell it in about a year (hopefully less ) the value will only be slightly less than what we paid for it.

What are you driving?  Is a car payment keeping you at work when you want to be home with the kiddos?  Does car debt have you trapped in the seemingly endless cycle of never ending car payments?  What will it take for you to pull the trigger and decide that enough is enough.  That you have HAD IT with debt?

My purpose for writing these blogs is simple.  To help you develop a plan to succeed.  This next week I will cover a plan that will get you out of debt and build more wealth than you ever thought possible.  Getting out of debt is not easy.  It is HARD work!  The exciting news it that thousands have done it and you can to… Are you up for the task?