The New Numbers, and We Did It!

We pulled it off...our Honda is sold, via Craigslist, for a good price. We also found a car we could buy with cash, for $2000.

On Tuesday, I put on my dreamy/practical to-do list: find the perfect car. On the vision board I made early this month, pictured below (not my prettiest vision board ever, to be sure, but it's doing the job), I had cut out and pasted a Subaru logo. We used to have a Subaru Forester that was my favorite car ever so I wanted another Subaru.

Over the weekend, we had the offer on the Honda CRV and began test-driving, trying several $2000 cars on Sunday and finding nothing we were quite sure about. Monday night George teaches, so we waited until Tuesday to go out again. I asked the potential Honda buyer if we could wait on accepting her offer until later in the week. She said sure. We knew we needed to find another car before we could sell ours. We went to a few places that afternoon. We found a 1997 Subaru Legacy wagon on Craigslist, in a neighboring town. We found a nearly identical (color and everything) Subaru Legacy, this one a 1996 with 40,000 more miles on it, at a business in town. These were the first Subarus we'd found all month, and the timing was perfect. We made arrangements to have our mechanic look at both on Wednesday. We decided the '97 was a better buy, so we purchased it that night.
And today, we handed off the CRV to a very nice young woman, a teacher and single mom who needed a car with better gas mileage. She will love that car, as we did.

This was by no means an easy thing for us to do. As we were contemplating the sale of our beloved CRV, I spent an evening reading Dave's chapter on selling the car in his Total Money Makeover book. The chapter is called: Two More Hurdles: Ignorance and Keeping Up With the Joneses. I had a really hard time selling our very nice car. I had a lot invested, mentally, in the safety and security, and general niceness, of that car. Going to a car that is as old as our teen-aged son, with 192,000 miles on it and a few dents, felt like taking a few steps backward in our lives.

Here's what Dave has to say on the issue of selling something we hold dear, in order to do better financially:

"Radical change in the quest for approval, which has involved purchasing
stuff with money we don't have, is required for a money breakthrough."

and

"Unless you have had a heart-level Total Money Makeover somewhere, sometime in your life, you are still doing something with money to impress others, and that has to change before you can get on a real plan to fiscal
fitness."

He was talking right to me. "Being real takes tremendous courage", he wrote. And I realized, I needed to sell this car if for no other purpose than to see I could live without this in my life. And because,

in one fell swoop,

we cut our debt load IN HALF!

And now that we're on this side of the deal, that feels great. We're well on our way to another goal on our vision board, being able to say "We're Debt-Free!" We can't wait.

p.s. sometimes I hate Blogger. Please forgive the wacky spaces...can't fix it.