June 7th, 2008 - Car will be paid off in just 16 days!
For the past year, I’ve been thinking about how our car loan will be paid off in July. About 2 months ago, I started talking about it. Yesterday, I decided to look up what the final payment would be. I’d been guessing it would be smaller than the regular payment, as that’s the way our house mortgage worked (and that’s the only payment schedule I recall seeing).
To my great surprise, it will be paid off this month! Oddly the payment will be $2 more than usual, but who cares? 16 days till our car is our’s! Woohoo!
We’ll be setting that payment amount aside now. Our hope is that this vehicle (a Honda CR-V, 2003, BTW) will last us another 5 years. We hope to have a good amount saved up towards our next car. Given that this one will be 10 years old, we figure it will be needing work between now and then, so we are unlikely to save the entire amount we’re putting aside. But we’ll have money for repairs. And even if we needed no repairs at all, we’ll only save about $22,000–and that’s about what the CR-V cost 5 years ago. Unlikely prices will go down. But even if we spend half of that on repairs, that’s still a great downpayment.
This is the third car I’ve paid off. The first was from my parents, although I just kept paying them $100 a month until it stopped working and I bought a new one. I consider it paid off since I didn’t have a loan on it when I got rid of it. My second car was a Saturn which I loved. I had a loan via my credit union at grad school, and I think we paid it off a year after leaving. It was nice to no longer have to send a check back there. I guess we owned it for about 7 years. We didn’t need a new car at the time we bought the CR-V, however, we were pretty sure we’d be having 2 dogs and 2 kids eventually. We already had one dog, and he wasn’t so great in the back seat. And he was getting bigger. And Eric didn’t particularly like the car–it was a smaller car and he wasn’t terribly comfortable in it.
I know, I know, it’s odd to be an environmentalist driving an SUV. I realize that all the time! However, with 2 large dogs and one kid, a car wouldn’t cut it. We could do a mini van, but I don’t really like them. And the dogs would have freer rein in the car. In the SUV, at least most of the time, they are contained in the back. (Emma wasn’t restricted on that with her first family. So when we leave the car, she usually runs up and sits in the driver’s seat. And eats any candy or cough drops she finds. She’s awfully cute as a driver.)
So, anyway: 16 days until we have only the mortgage payment. WOW.