Grim news for buying a car post BK

[Help!]

I used to feel the same way about used cars, until my husband and I had absolutely no choice but to buy a beater or ride the bus. When we were discharged, we took the cash we were able to scrape up and bought a $1500 23 year old car. It's been absolutely dependable and every day I grow more deeply in love with it knowing it cost us less than two months of payments on our ridiculous SUV. We also have a savings account for the first time and when it does need repairs we'll have more than enough cash. Owning a car is much, much better than being owned by a car!

[IBroke]

There is a bumper sticker available, saying "OLD, BUT PAID"...

[freshstartfl]

DM, Rhetorically speaking, where in FL do you live that you have to drive 4 hours one-way to work? You can drive completely across the state, from the West coast to the East Coast, in that amount of time. Surely somewhere along the way you can find a mid-sized town or city to work in?

[IBroke]

You can drive completely across the state, from the West coast to the East Coast, in that amount of time.

Hahaha - you've forgotten the drive from from Jacksonville to Key West..

[debtmonster]

I'm hoping to just keep the car I have then. I have no intention on signing any paperwork to re-affirm. So if they do take it, then I will have to do the $1500 dollar car route as an absolute emergency.

I wouldn't go as far as a 23 year old car. I would think there are newer cars to fit the bill. After poking around on Autotrader.com and limiting the search to 1997 and cars no more than $1500 with under 100,000 miles I found:

2002 Ford Focus 78k miles $1200 - private seller
1997 Mazda 626 87k miles $1295 - private seller

The deals are out there... just not very many to select from... and they all require CASH MONEY to buy.

I did a search on cars from dealers only and everything I saw was either a wreck or falsely advertised with bait and switch ads of "down payment" and crap. Private sellers are the only way to go. Dealers are all such a rip off in most cases if you was an ultra-cheap car with 2 months worth of saving.

[debtmonster]

DM, Rhetorically speaking, where in FL do you live that you have to drive 4 hours one-way to work? You can drive completely across the state, from the West coast to the East Coast, in that amount of time. Surely somewhere along the way you can find a mid-sized town or city to work in?

I used to work in Orlando and it was a 2 hour drive each way from here. 93 miles one-way. Like I said in other posts, there's no suitable jobs anywhere remotely close to me.

Once I foreclose and the sheriff sale comes, I'll move to where the jobs are and rent for a few years.

[freshstartfl]

Nope. I was talking coast to coast, not North to South. Besides, there's plenty of towns between Jax and KW, too. I don't expect you to tell me your address and invite me over for tea or anything, so I'll just put it this way: my ex is from Dixie County, FL. I've lived in FL my entire life and had never even HEARD of Dixie until I met him, that's how small it is. Yet, they're pretty close to places with jobs: Gainsville, Tallahassee, etc. You should rethink your commute and focus on things more local. A $20 an hour job that's 4 hours away is just as good as a $10 hour job that's 1 hour away, if you value your time and factor in gasoline.

[MichaelInUT]

Here's my two cents on car buying, with a BK and/or the current economy.

We are paying on a 2005 Pontiac Grand Am. There's a bit over $8k left on the loan ($250/mo.), and it is worth thousands less than that. We're giving it up in our BK; "small" as the payments are, they'd drag us down, and are definitely not worth the vehicle. That leaves us needing a replacement. I completely understand not wanting to inherit "other people's problems," and pretty much every used car will be a time bomb. There's always something wrong with it whether you know it or not. If it's only $500, you know it KBB's for only $1k and needs $2k+ worth of work. If it's over $4k, it takes all your money, so the first time you need to fix it, you can't.

We may desperately want our dream car, an '07 Chevy Impala, but that's just not going to happen. At least not for several years. What anyone needs is reliable transportation from point A to point B. Bonus points if it looks decent and has a nice feature or two So here's my solution. I found a used 1998 Oldsmobile LSS for $1,500. It ran and looked okay, but I assumed I'd need to sink money into it. It got me through the past few months commuting to work, and now with the tax return I'm getting every last thing fixed on it. Transmission. Brakes. Even the passenger's side vent actuator.

Now I've paid roughly what it blue books for total (car + repairs), but look what I've got: a completely checked out, fixed, and reliable vehicle. It's got the silly extras like leather seats, power everything, CD, yadda yadda. Best of all, it's OURS. We own it outright. No debts, no loans, no payments. Only gas and insurance. All right, so it's not the flashiest. It's not our dream car. But isn't that half the problem today, people trying to live beyond their means to have all their dreams NOW... then it all comes crashing down as soon as you lose your job, or have a preemie, or get sick? Our tax return this year was about $5k. Either our income will go up, or our tax returns stay fairly high. Either way, with some saving, we can likely buy a new Impala outright in cash after about five years, if that's our main goal.

Didn't mean to get on a soapbox, sorry. I hope my views help. It's just so easy to think you "need" things, when in fact many others are going through life quite well without them. A few dings or spots of wear may very well be worth not having to shell out hundreds of dollars a month, and perhaps ending up right back in the same financial black hole. Good luck!

PS. Much older cars can be ridiculously dependable. This probably makes ME sound old, but they just don't make them like that anymore. I used to own a few 1985 Buick LeSabre LTD V8 sedans, and you simply could not kill them. Still miss the huge space and smooth ride...

[freshstartfl]

Kudos, Michael! Good post. I am looking at my newly acquired 2000 Infiniti with the same affection. Sure, it may give me problems in a few months, or, at least sooner than my 2004 Xterra might have, had I kept that instead. But $1500 left to pay on the Infiniti, or $11k left to pay for the Xterra? Really easy choice, even if I run into mechanical problems in the future.

[freshstartfl]

[QUOTE=debtmonster;242858]I used to work in Orlando and it was a 2 hour drive each way from here. 93 miles one-way. /QUOTE]

2 hours to go 93 miles?! Either you're driving Miss Daisy, or you're taking I4.

[TEW]

http://www.roadandtravel.com/buyinga.../newvsused.htm

[Help!]

There is a bumper sticker available, saying "OLD, BUT PAID"...

Yes, and there's that one that says "don't laugh - it's paid for". I like them both, but the car is not beat up enough to wear bumper stickers (yet). It is seriously a nice looking car. It may just be my imagination, but I swear people treat you better when they think you're poor. I've noticed that sometimes people even let me merge now, voluntarily! It may just be they're worried something's going to fall off my car though.

[debtmonster]

Michael, that was an excellent post.

My father sold his 1996 Oldsmobile for $3,000 and it has less than 70,000 miles on it. A month later the transmission went out. The people came back to my dad all upset that they spent every dime they had on that car and did not have another $1500-2000 to put another transmission in.

I will be in that same exact boat. I live far from any jobs. For privacy I won't give my address out. I have had my resume on Monster for YEARS. Nobody wants to hire me here. They all want me to relocate to Tampa, Orlando or Jacksonville. Those places are all very far. Each one being 2 to 3 hours drive one way.

I learned my lesson and will never buy out in the boonies ever again. I thought my home business would be making $7,000 to $8,000/mo. by now but it tanked with the economy when all of my customers lost their jobs.

[debtmonster]

[QUOTE=freshstartfl;242866]

I used to work in Orlando and it was a 2 hour drive each way from here. 93 miles one-way. /QUOTE]

2 hours to go 93 miles?! Either you're driving Miss Daisy, or you're taking I4.

I-4 was part of it. There's a TON of traffic and lots of slow speed zones I have to go through. It's all back country roads in the middle of NOWHERE. Cops all over the place with nothing better to do than radar all over the place. Once it took me 3 hours to get home when I-4 was backed up. After all of those miles I put on my car and all of the stress and health problems, I left the job. It wasn't work sacrificing my health over a job.

[debtmonster]

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average U.S. household spent 18.1 percent of its income on vehicle costs, second only to housing. Given that nearly one out of every five bucks that you earn will go into your car, you're right to think long and hard about whether it's best to go with new or used.

And at the time I bought my BMW, it was only 8% of my income and people here won't stop giving me grief about it! I'm sick of the personal attacks! At the time I bought the car, I was living within my means.