It’s been a couple of months since I last updated this series. You can go back and read the preceding 4 parts if you like. (part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4) The basic summary is this. One of our cars blew it’s timing belt and royally messed up the inside of the engine. We decided to rebuild the engine, and amongst all that fun, we bought another car and were left with a third car that we really, really, didn’t need any longer. When I ended part 4, I enthusiastically wrote that we might soon be done with the whole fiasco. Boy was that wishful thinking. Here’s how it all wrapped up.
The folks that had looked at it and were excited about buying it couldn’t. Terrible credit would be my guess. (All the more reason to brush up on improving your credit score.) In any case, we never heard back from them. According to the research I’d done, the car was worth about $4100, and we had it listed at what we thought was a fair price of $3500. Not a premium, but what we thought was enough of a discount to make it attractive. Unfortunately, that wasn’t necessarily true.
We got plenty of calls by just parking the car in a well traffic-ed lot and even a few offers. The best of them was $2800. We just weren’t ready to let it go for that price. We owned the car, so we weren’t paying a dime to keep it, besides registration, and insurance. Registration is fixed, and the car was older. We’ve been around the insurance bit before and made sure to get a good insurance quote comparison. So, neither is very expensive. So we had the numbers on our side to hold on to it and not let it go for a ridiculous amount. The best, in a funny-ha-ha sense, offer we got was to trade the car for two snowmobiles. It probably wasn’t a terrible deal, but what am I going to do with two snowmobiles?
So, the car sat. And sat. And sat. For four months, it sat. And, to be completely honest, I was ready to get rid of it. It was just one more thing that was floating around out there that needed to be finished off. So, I expanded the net. I posted the car on a couple of free internet classifieds sites. A couple of weeks later, I got a couple of phone calls. And, some wheeling and dealing later, some folks came down and bought the car for their daughter in college.
We ended up taking $3000 for it. Much less than we would have liked, but our desire to get it off of our books overrode our desire to get that extra bit of money out of it. We could have probably held out for the larger amount and maybe gotten it if we had wanted to hold on to the car for a longer period of time. We were on the verge of a storage issue though. Whether we like it or not, it’s going to eventually snow, and then it would have to be moved from where it was parked and brought back home. Where we would have to move it as often as it snowed so that the plows could come through to plow the road. Inconvenient to say the least.
We’re glad to have it gone. We’ll use the money from it to pay off the loan we had to take to pay for the rebuilding of the engine on the other car. That’ll take care of that payment and get us back on track with our debt repayment. Even with our less than aggressive plan that we’ll be going back to, the numbers look good. We’ll be debt free with the exception of Mortgage and student loans sometime in 2013. Two years seems like a long time, but considering we started this journey over 5 years ago, it’s just a drop in the bucket.
Here’s to hoping that wraps up the car trouble for the immediate future!
photo credit: Brian Johhnson
I started this blog to share what I know and what I was learning about personal finance. Along the way I’ve met and found many blogging friends. Please feel free to connect with me on the Beating Broke accounts: Twitter and Facebook.
You can also connect with me personally at Novelnaut, Thatedeguy, Shane Ede, and my personal Twitter.
I don’t comment often, but just had to tell you:
1) I am so glad we aren’t the only ones who have un-ending car issues.
and
2) That I am not the only one who can’t pay off debt in like one year.
At least you know the car is going to good use. 😉 I know it’s hard to part with a car for less than what you want. A few years back we sold our old Miata convertible (it was a great little car) and got a few hundred less than we wanted. But at least it wasn’t sitting in the back yard with grass growing around it!
Wow, I am shocked that you had so much trouble selling your car but am glad you did finally get rid of it … smart choice not to take the snow mobiles. 🙂 Last time I sold a car I had a local used car dealer do it on consignment. It was so worth the commission I paid him as it took me completely out of the equation in the negotiations, etc. And he got me way more than I think I could have gotten on my own.
Well, at least it’s over now and you can move on with life!
Selling anything requires a buyer, It sounds like you received a lot of phone calls, but no buyers. Finding a buyer is a little more difficult. I hate car problems because it puts me at the mercy of the mechanics. I recently had an leak from my wife’s car fixed. They said it was repaired, but kept leaking. I took it back twice and they repaired it for free. I think my car problems are done for a while too!
With so many incentives out there on new vehicles (and cheap borrowing rates) right now it may have had something to do with the difficult time you had.
definitely worth it to have it removed off of your to do list. sometimes you can see much clearer once you have less on the plate, plus your goal of debt free by 2013 is that much closer now.
Thank goodness that I don’t own a vehicle. Now that’s what I call beating broke!