Life Update : We Had To Purchase A Car
Living in Jersey after graduating from Hampton has been a great but interesting transition. Learning the lingo (yurrrr), getting use to the cold winters, great food, and not having a car. Yes, you read that right! We haven’t had a car since moving here in July 2017 and it was due to two main factors. First, the apartment we stayed in when we first moved here was going to charge $300 a month for a parking space. Second, we were able to walk and/or take public transportation to our jobs. However, my wife secured her bag with a new job and we had to buy a car a few of months ago!
Before we jump into the fun stuff of the car buying process, I know some of you all are probably wondering how we were able to be carless for close to three years. In the age of technology, we used every app in the App Store to make our lives a little bit easier. For starters, we lived on top of a Whole Foods at the time. But I am sure you are aware that the reason they call it “Whole Paycheck’ is because an organic banana, milk and some bread will run you roughly $30+ there. So a lot of times when we needed groceries, we utilized the platform ZipCar to rent a car for a couple hours to get groceries from Trader Joes and run other errands. Also, we leveraged a lot of delivery services like UberEats, Amazon, Instacart, and Hellofresh to help us navigate life without a car throughout those three years. And let’s not forget our new best friend - public transportation! Although it was annoying to coordinate certain train schedules to make sure we got places on time, it was better than paying for a car loan, insurance, and parking at the time.
We aren’t millionaires (yet) so we couldn’t just get the car without a care in the world. There were a few things that we considered before buying the car which could be considered when making other major purchases (e.g. buying a home).
Is it needed? Yes, it was a lot cheaper for us to get the car instead of her taking public transportation + ubers every single day for her new job.
Maintenance. We didn’t want a car that only took premium gas, tires that cost $500 each or even a car that only took oil from the finest manufacturer.
Does it significantly increase our expenses? We are budgeters so we did not want to inflate our lifestyle to the point where we couldn’t save as much.
Now to the fun car stuff! I firmly believe in never paying full price for anything. Especially with cars, since the value of a new car drops 20% within the first 12 months of purchase. With that in mind, we decided to go the certified pre-owned (CPO) route. We noticed that a lot of the CPO vehicles were newer cars like 2018 coming off of rental arrangements. Due to it being a rental in its prior life, these cars had slightly higher mileage but were well maintained throughout its usage. Because of that, we were able to get a great deal on a 2018 Hyundai Elantra. Not only do Hyundais come with a 100k mile warranty, it was within our budget and had the latest features Kendra just had to have (e.g. Apple CarPlay). But as always, I want to hear from you! What is one major purchase you had recently? What are some things you consider before making a major purchase?
Holding you accountable,
DWM