Stimulating the Economy is FUN!

Our Mitsubishi Galant is 10 years old, and had been beginning to show its age lately.  We decided earlier in the week that maybe we'd better start looking for a new car.  After checking cars.com, we found several vehicles that were used, but barely, between the model years of 2009 and 2010.  After checking Consumer Reports, we pretty much settled on Toyota, Honda, and Nissan.  Ford had good marks too, but didn't really see anything we were interested in.  Most of the cars we saw were mid-size type sedans: Altimas, Accords, and Camrys.  However, there was also one Toyota Avalon as well.  All were in the$13K to $19K range, which is what was the most shocking.  All of these cars new are about $30K or more.  However, two years of depreciation takes them under $20K.  Crazy!

Anyway, after doing the research and realizing that our payment would be much less than we'd expected, and then finding a credit union we could join that would get us a rate of 3.75%, we decided to go ahead and get it done today.  I really wanted the Avalon the most, so decided to go to the Toyota dealership first, though I figured with the Altimas being so much less expensive (about $14.5K vs $18K), that I'd have to go with the Altima.  Then, I drove the Avalon.  GAME OVER!  It helped that they had in-house financing at 2.9%, so that turned out even better than I expected, too.

The paperwork, as usual, took a while, but that wasn't too bad because they had a couple of nice couches with ESPN on a big screen.  Problem was, they got it ready for me at 4:00--right when the Jazz game was starting.  Because we just turned our cable TV off, I was counting on this game NOT being on ESPN because I have broadband League Pass.  But, if a game is on national TV, it's blacked out on League Pass.  The Jazz have been playing so well that ESPN picked up tonight's game, meaning the only way I could see it was if they took longer to get my car ready; which they didn't do.  Oh well, it allowed me to get home just in time for the kids season-ending soccer party, which ended up being a lot of fun.

It was a long day, but a lot of fun too.