Cars

Wow, I'm really falling off on my blog. Sorry, people.

There have been lots of things going on, but I can't blog about the things that have taken my attention so completely. It's not time yet. I'll give you a teaser to say that I'll tell you about it when I can.

There is something going on that I CAN blog about. Cars. My husband has been driving a 2001 Hyundai Elantra for the last 5 years, when we traded cars and bought my minivan (yes, I'm one of THOSE minivan moms- I never thought the day would come, but it did). We bought the Elantra new, and I happily drove it for the last little bit of my music teaching career, and beginning of stay-at-home motherhood. Big girl was brought home from the hospital in that car. It's been a servicable commuter car for Hubby, but it's had some issues in the last several years. We went through receipts for the work we've had done on it since 2006 (including a tune-up, radiator replacement, clutch job, brake job) and it totaled over $4000. The car has over 108,000 miles on it. It's been around the block a few thousand times.

Monday the clutch started feeling funny, and the car was hard to shift. Hubby called me and had me meet him at the repair shop we always use to pick him up so we could leave the car there. I was on my way to meet him when my cell phone rang (I had it ON and CHARGED and ON MY PERSON!! - for once). He was having second thoughts about getting it fixed. How much is it worth? How much are we willing to spend to keep this car going? These were questions we needed to answer before we left the car there. So we came home (I stopped off at the grocery store to make it worth going out, and to pick up a couple things for dinner). Within minutes of digging around online, we found out that the wholesale value of the car was only $900. So our question was answered. It wasn't worth while for us to keep throwing money at that car.

The next online journey was to see what was out there. We started with Carmax. We quickly found a 2008 Hyundai Elantra with less than 7000 miles on it for a really good price. All the other cars in that price range had at least 20,000-30,000 miles. It seemed pretty clear what to do. That particular car was in another city. We called Carmax in our city, and they called someone at the other city to check and make sure the car didn't stink like smoke or have some hidden defect that we couldn't determine online. Once we got word that everything looked good, we asked them to transfer that car to our city, which they do for free.

Tuesday I spent a couple hours washing and vacuuming the old car. There's nothing I can do about the hail damage or door dings, but I got it looking quite a bit better than it has looked in quite some time. Then I took it to Carmax to see what they'd give us for it. They appraised our car at $1200!! Looks like we have a deal.

None of that has taken place yet. The new-to-us car should be here tomorrow, and we still have to jump through the financing hoops, but barring some major fiasco we haven't foreseen, tomorrow we'll be trading our old Elantra for a newer one. The thing that excites me most is that the new car has an aux in for plugging in an iPod to the stereo. I'm jealous now... I'm pretty sure the next car I drive will have one of those. It seems like they're pretty standard these days, just like cup-holders and keyless entry fobs.

So that's the news of the week around here. I'll post a picture of the new car when we get it.