So here’s my latest debate. The facts:<\/p>\n
1) I love <\/em>awesome cars. My last three have been a Saab 9-3, a Mini Cooper S, and my current 400HP V-8 GTO. I’d drive something even more ridiculous if I wasn’t unwilling to pay an insane amount of money for a car, but I’m not that irresponsible.<\/p>\n 2) I’m at the point in life where I’m doing well financially, I feel like I’m on the right track for retirement, I’m knowledgeable about investing, and I know where I want to be in the 5-10 year timeframe: my goal is to move to the Caribbean and own a bar. I know you’ve all probably heard me say that a million times, but I’m absolutely serious about it.<\/p>\n 3) I’m aware that my vehicle is my greatest luxury expense. Sans car payment, high insurance rates, premium gas, paying extra for foreign-car service (try getting parts for this Australian-made car once, even though it’s branded GM), having to pay to swap out tires seasonally, etc., I’m estimated I’d be saving over $8,000 a year. That’s money that could be all going into savings for my future goals.<\/p>\n I’m considering selling my car, paying off the loan (I’d pretty much just break even, considering the current market), and buying another car with cash. That car would have to be cheap, because I have to save up for it first. I refuse to tap my emergency fund, so I’d be saving that money from scratch. If I worked really hard at it, I’m guessing I could put together a few thousand bucks within… 4 months? Six? It depends on the amount.<\/p>\n So what does a reliable used car cost? I understand that if I buy an older car that’s likely to be over 100k miles, I’m pretty much guaranteeing that some work will need to be done. That’s to be expected. I just want something that runs reliably, will start in the dead of winter, and will be fairly cheap to fix (I can do the basics myself). Since most of my travel tends to involve airplanes, 80% of my driving is making the 6-mile commute to work, anyway.<\/p>\n So how much cash do I need? Is $5,000 enough? $10,000? I see plenty of 2000-era cars on Craigslist for $3k, and that makes me more than a little nervous. Help me, internet! I really don’t know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So here’s my latest debate. The facts: 1) I love awesome cars. My last three have been a Saab 9-3, a Mini Cooper S, and my current 400HP V-8 GTO. I’d drive something even more ridiculous if I wasn’t unwilling to pay an insane amount of money for a car, but I’m not that irresponsible. …read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-car"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/po9qt-pe","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1564"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1564\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}