Stupid Car Tricks Part 2

So, if you read stupid car tricks part 1 (which was really long and bless you if you read it all) then you know I left off with the part where we traded in our two financed cars so we could get a new to us financed mini-van. We lowered our overall monthly payments but (and there always is a but) we only had 1 van. Two parents. Two kids. One van. It could be done we told ourselves. People do it. We could do it. Turns out we didn't do it for longer than 6 months. We were weak. My dear husband needed his own transportation you know since we didn't work at the same exact school 4 classrooms apart or anything!

So, we of little money, sought a cheap ride for dh so he could drive to work and then tennis practice and still get home without me dragging out a toddler and a baby all hours of the evening to pick him up after tennis matches. So we found him a used Ford Ranger Pickup which of course we promptly financed to the tune of $250 per month for 5 years. So, now we had a mini-van at $465 and a truck at $250. Stupid car debt of $715 per month!!!

Looking back I can't believe how stupid we were!!!!

So, (I've started every single paragraph with so, so far!!! Heehee) everything was not good. We were stressed out. But boy no one could have predicted that it was about to get worse. My dh lost his job when someone's nieces' boyfriend's sister needed a teaching job. (And those of you from small towns knows this is not a far stretch!) Then September 11th hit and there were no job ops. Oh, and we had had our 3rd child by then too!

Hubby decides to become a stay-at-home dad for a year and go back to school to get an AS in computer programming. He was getting a small amount of unemployment (due to 9/11 and the Grace of God) and when that ran out they paid him to go to school (again, another government program due to 9/11). But there was no way we could make all of these crazy payments. Remember that we were in credit card debt too.

So, I, as a desperate wife turned to frugality. I read the "Complete Tightwad Gazette" and other simple living books. I learned to spend less but I didn't learn anything about actual finances. When we couldn't make both car payments I wrote myself a check from our last credit card, deposited it into my bank account and then paid off the mini-van note with the money from the credit card. This way I could lower my "minimum monthly payment" from $465 to $250. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. But at that time, I thought I was doing what I could to get by.

Fast forward 4 years we were making good money. Still in debt up to our ears. We got house fever. We had rented most of our married life, then we bought a used mobile home and lived there four years. We wanted out of it. We wanted something new. I worked feverishly to improve our credit scores. We saved a little bit of money and paid off our smallest credit card debts.

We bought our home in March 2005 and moved in with our mini-van and pick-up truck. Three months later mini-van died with major electrical problems. We still didn't know about Dave Ramsey so we traded in the mini-van and bought a brand-new 2005 Ford Freestyle. We still had a year to pay on the truck and we added the Freestyle payment of $490 per month.

Then we found Dave. So we paid off the truck early, attacked our credit card debt, and are driving these cars until their wheels fall off. DH's truck is now 10 years old, and other than a few dings is still going strong. After we pay off the IRS, we are going to double up on the Freestyle payments. I will never have a car payment again. We are done with stupid car tricks!