new car

Our old "little" van had been dying a slow death so we knew that we were going to need to buy a new car soon. I socked away as much cash as I could as we were determined to only buy with cash.

The van reached 211,000 miles and the radiator cracked. Brian took a gallon of water with him everyday and had to refill before he came home.

So he withdrew $7000 cash and we went to the local dealers. Our only requirement was that it had to be a Honda, Toyota or a newer Hyundai and have relatively low miles. We needed a commuter car as the van only got 18 mpg. We didn't want to pay more than $6500.

The first car we test drove was a Toyota Corolla with no power anything. It was fine but didn't thrill Brian. I spotted a Honda Civic at the rival dealer lot while on the Toyota test drive (ha!) so we went there next.

The Honda Civic was a 2002, power everything, A/C and had a CD player. It only had 92,000 miles and was in great condition. Well, it actually had about 143,000 kilometers as the car had come from Canada.

We test drove it and loved it! The list price was originally $7500 and we offered $6500 cash and that included all registration/DMV fees. They accepted. It was rather easy. I'm thinking they were glad of the cash and glad to get rid of a Canadian car.

Here's Brian pulling out the Ben Franklins. I was hoping we could get $1000 bills but having all those $100's was impressive too.


Picture of the car outside of the Goodwill Outlet store.


Brian had to get used to driving 100 kilometers/per hour on the highway and we may get the dashboard changed to miles.

I'm so thankful we were able to pay cash and I hope never to have a car payment the rest of my life. How refreshing it was to walk out of the dealership owning the car and not being a slave to the bank. It was a big sacrifice to save all of that money but totally worth it!

Savin' dough

I'm tired of our big van payment and student loan payment. The student loan isn't very big but we just make slightly more than the minimum payment each month. I'm ahead several months on the van payments and always put all of our extra money toward it. We aren't in any credit card debt so once we retire those debts we will only have the house payment.

I've been reading the Dave Ramsey books and we are going to follow his plan for getting out of debt and building a 6 month emergency fund. Then we will work on retirement saving. We already have a Roth IRA and some stocks going toward retirement but I would love to put lots more money toward it.

So in an effort to reduce our grocery bill, I finally went to the Orowheat Bread outlet store. I used to go all the time. We can go through 1 loaf of bread in one lunch meal so bread was an expense I wanted to reduce. We do make our own bread for evening meals but it doesn't make very much and fresh baked bread doesn't last long in our house!

Here is what I got. I HAD to buy donuts for Graedon but still ended up with $45.00 worth of bread for $11.61.

Four loaves of buttermilk bread, two loaves of Orowheat wheat bread, two loaves of Orowheat light wheat bread (for me as it's lower carb than the rest), 3 big packages of hamburger buns including the ultra gourmet onion buns, a huge package of hot dog buns, a package of sandwhich rolls and a box of assorted donuts.

We love going down to farmer's market on Saturday and buying berries and veggies. We are growing our own veggies this year and the blueberries we wanted to buy are terribly expensive. So we hopped into the van on Saturday and went to pick our own. $1.00 a pound! We spent $20.00 and our freezer is full of fresh berries.

Now I'm looking for more ways to save money in our budget and get out of debt in 1 year. Fortunately I'm a frugal person (or I used to be when we had NO money) so I just need to get back into the swing of things. I need to get to the sewing machine and sew again as it saves us money on our kids clothes and I also sell my clothing on eBay.