See this is the thing. He and I regularly get mistaken for early 20s or sometimes even teenagers. I think I do less now because I usually have a couple of tagalongs with me and of course I'm pregnant, but honestly, if I didn't have the kids and wasn't wearing my wedding ring, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if I got sidelong looks wondering why I was so young and pregnant. This isn't a bad thing, I know. I appreciate that in 20 years if we still look super young that others might be jealous. I hope the young genes stick around. I like them. By the same token, it's nice to be taken seriously. If I roll up in a minivan and my two and soon to be three kids hop out, there's no question I am at least somewhat capable. :) But when we explode like sardines out of the tiny Elantra? Yeah, that gets no respect.
Hahahaha! Whether any of that is true or not, I'm really excited about the fact that we got our van now. We had planned to wait until after next year's tax return and get a new-ish model, but after talking through our Dave Ramsey financial advice influenced goals, we realized we were going about this purchase all wrong. I had a couple good conversations with my mom and sister this last week that triggered a great conversation with Bill about what we really wanted and needed at this point. So rather than getting suckered in looking at pretty new van options, we decided the best idea would be to get a van not necessarily much newer than the Hyundai we already had, with a reasonable number of miles on it, and have it get us through the rest of grad school and hopefully a while longer. At some future point we can upgrade if we like, but for now it's really just that we need more seats and cargo room than in our current vehicles, not that we needed an upgrade or could even really afford one. I have been feeling uneasy about the whole purchasing a vehicle thing for a while now because it didn't feel like the financial part was going to work right, but this all fell into place literally Friday night. We ended up searching online for a few hours that night, found a promising van fairly close by, went out there Saturday to test drive, and ultimately negotiated what felt like a very good deal on it that we were able to pay for with the cash we've been saving. What a fantastic feeling!
So there you have it. We are official minivan owners and quite pleased about it. And now for a tip or two on what made the buying process way easier. First, shopping online is wonderful. We didn't have to drag the kids from dealer to dealer and deal with asking the salespeople to show us what they had. Since it was last minutes, we took them with us. Instead we just went in, said we wanted to test drive this one vehicle, and then negotiated from there when it fit our needs. If it hadn't been what we wanted, we would have just left and gone to our next option another day. Two, we had a plan for what we wanted to spend, so nothing they said made us suddenly interested in blowing our budget. Three, we did our research beforehand on this particular vehicle and what Kelly Blue Book said it was worth. The dealership was one where they claimed they set good prices so no negotiation was needed, but they were still way higher than they ought to be. Since we printed off the KBB report and brought it in, we had a place to negotiate from and were able to come up with a deal that worked for both of us. Knowledge is power! Four, I'm pretty sure bringing along two little kids made the whole process go faster. No salesperson shooting the breeze just because, dragging stuff out. It still took a lot longer than I expected to do the paperwork, despite not doing any financing. My heavens, they need to speed that process up, but we made it through. :) Anyway, it was fun and I really appreciated being armed with some understanding of how to negotiate. Thank you Negotiations class in my Master's degree program! You have come in handy yet again!
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| 2006 Nissan Quest. |
3 comments:
We're trying to get pregnant with #3 and we know as soon as we do, we have about 8 months to get a new car (nothing like a deadline, eh?) because one car only has two working seatbelts in the backseat and our other car is too narrow to have three carseats in the backseat. :D Thanks for some of those tips--they're really helpful!
Fun! Welcome to the world of adulthood and minivan ownership. .. Both are great:)
Hurray for minivans! Seriously, I love mine SO much. And I hear you on the car-buying process...it was SO stressful! (Did you have dealers kind of grumpy at you for paying in cash? I totally was not expecting that but they were all huffy about not doing financing.)
So my parents know somebody who goes to car auctions and we ended up buying our van from him--it took FOREVER for him to find the van we wanted, but then we realized later it was because we were going for bare-bones and he was holding out for all the options. It was almost 10K cheaper than what the dealers were asking--I seriously had no idea that minivans were so pricey!
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