Whoops, We Almost Bought a New Car for No Good Reason

As long-time readers know, we have been battling car lust for a while. Well, at least I have. Our current car, our trusty 2006 Toyota Matrix, has never let us down. Okay, maybe the paint job has let us down a bit. And maybe my DIY clear coat job... definitely looks like a DIY clear coat job. And sure, maybe I have never gotten around to opening up the passenger side door and installing a new window motor.

But as far as things that actually matter on a twelve year old car, everything is tip top. The clutch is still springy. The engine still purrs. And most importantly here in the desert, the AC blows really, really cold.

Something changed once Baby AF came into our lives though. My previously casual searches for manual Subaru Outbacks became part of my daily routine. When we realized how difficult it would be to find an Outback with a stick and under 80,000 miles, we broadened the search to include Golf Sportwagens: seemingly the only other wagon available in the U.S. with a manual transmission.

Why would we even need a new car though? The motivation sprung from something pretty minor: once we put Baby AF's carseat in the middle seat, suddenly putting our two dogs in the hatchback version of an 2006 Toyota Corolla became a harder game of Tetris than it used to be. Instead of folding down both seats and letting the dogs have space to roam, now there was a carseat in the middle, preventing either side of the 60/40 split to fold down. 

And while the hatch of a Matrix is more spacious than you'd think, getting our two goldens to lie down back there at the same time just wasn't happening.

Thus began countless conversations about which kind of car we should buy. Should we opt for an older Subaru, a Japanese workhorse that's probably a lot more reliable? Or a new-but-probably-more-finicky European model that at least had a six year warranty.

And when we should buy one? Right now, since we have some trips to make over the holidays? Or should we try to hold out until we had a second baby? 

After a few test drives, we woke up one weekend day, somehow ready to pull the trigger on a Volkswagen listed for just over $17k.

And as we were about to call the dealer and start haggling, my wife asked a question we should have asked earlier: "Wait, why do we need two cars right now?"

"Um."

"We both work from home, and our idea of hanging out is having people over for boardgames. How often do we even need one car?"

"Um."

"Even if we need a new car eventually, are we sure we need it right now?"

"But the dogs..."

"We drive with the dogs like, maybe, twice a year. Shouldn't we just rent a car that week? Isn't there some way to get the two dogs in the car?"

"They don't really fit in the back with the seats up."

"What if we slid the passenger seat up and, like, put a plastic bin on the floor behind it, with a dog bed on top."

"Huh. That could work."

This bin we just happened to have fits pretty nicely.

Insert smaller golden retriever here. ^^^

It's just a prototype, but I think this idea could work. We can put all our luggage in the front passenger seat and floor, Mrs. Done by Forty would ride in the back seat with Baby AF and Cayenne, while Jax, humongous old pup that he is, gets the back of the hatchback all to himself.

And hey, the bin that's holding up half of the dog bed can be storage for whatever we're bringing on the trip, too.

Sure, it's a pretty ridiculous way to get us all in the car. And yeah, we're taking the too-frugal-by-half approach, when a lot of other sensible people would just buy a new car.

Still, this feels like us. This feels like the thing we ought to do. We should at least see if it works before spending money on a car we'll barely ever drive, right?

It's such a simple idea that I wonder why we didn't come up with this earlier, instead of almost dropping nearly twenty grand on a car we don't need except for, maybe, two weeks a year.

Then it dawned on us. We're tired, all day, every day. The combination of work, Mrs. Done by Forty's R.A. position and dissertation, house chores and all things Baby AF: all of this has us running on fumes most of the time.

Plus, as our twitter followers know, we just went through a scare with Jax, then had to help him get around the house using a towel to support his hind legs for a few weeks, whenever he had to pee or move to a new room. (It turns out it was just bad vertigo, not brain cancer or a stroke or anything worrisome, thank God.) So thankfully we still have two, lovable-but-pretty-big golden retrievers, which we have to find a way to transport a couple times a year.

Jax, back to normal.

Cayenne, back to normal, begging for food.

With all the stress in our lives right now, it appears that we're prone to making some questionable financial decisions at the moment. We might make more emotional purchases: even some big ones.It turns out you can be pretty good with money most of the time, and then still make huge mistakes when you're not operating at your best.

This is a reminder for me to be more sympathetic to people who have made some less-than-optimal financial decisions, or to at least try to understand where they're coming from before climbing up on my high horse. The person who took out more student loan debt than I think was prudent, or who maybe took out a payday loan, or bought a second car...maybe they were just going through a stressful time. Maybe they're better with money than I am on a good day, but I've just had a less stressful life, so I've avoided a couple more pitfalls.

This should change the approach I ought to take when I'm writing about personal finances. If I assume my readers probably already know it's not a great idea to take on more debt or to buy yet another new car, then writing from a perspective of educating is just...wrongheaded. 

Readers might not need much personal finance "education" at all. Instead, they might need an affordable way to deal with stress, or maybe some affordable daycare, or sufficiently high wages, to prevent them from making a bad financial decision in the first place. 

If the dismal results of personal finance education programs tell us anything, it might be that simply teaching people what to do with their money, just providing them the knowledge, isn't going to cut it. We might need to view poor financial decisions as the result of various stresses, rather than the result of any ignorance of basic personal finance.

I think there's probably more here. But I'm in no position to advise people on how to defeat life's various stresses, as they are all kicking my ass at the moment. For now, I think the best thing I can do is to not make any big changes, and to try to postpone any big purchases. 

There's plenty of little stuff I can focus on instead. Like... how do I keep a golden retriever from licking this little guy's face for six straight hours in the car.

As always, thanks for reading.

*Outback photo is from the National Roads & Motorists Association account at Flickr Creative Commons.