I was a Minivan Mom... for 2 days

Me getting into our first Minivan...

Me returning our first minivan 2 days later...

We named her Al, as in Almost
Here's the story:
So right before the car breaking down craziness happened we had been talking about what kind of minivan we would want to get when the time came, what features we'd like, even what color, etc. It's been the plan for some time now that we would use our next tax return to put a down payment on a minivan. With that only being months away now it comes up in conversation a lot. Then our car broke down and after the mechanic repaired it he said the whole radiator should be replaced soon. His exact words in the broken English he spoke were "You must whole radiator replace much soon." So as we were driving the rest of the way home to Santa Cruz we started thinking maybe we could use the $1000 that's left of our emergency fund to put a down payment on a minivan now instead of investing anymore money into the Blazer. So I got onto AutoTrader.com on my phone and one of the 1st minivans that came up was a 2005 Chrysler Town and Country Limited. It had EVERYTHING. DVD player, power sliding doors, power rear door, navigation system, not ridiculously high miles, and it was listed more than $3000 below Kelly Blue Book value putting it right in the middle of the price range we were hoping for. It was even the color I wanted, dark blue. So the morning after we got home, Wednesday, we headed over the hill to check it out. We test drove it and fell in love.

So far so good right? Well then they checked our credit. Our credit score is pretty good, mid to upper 700s. Most of our credit comes from student loans, and we found out through this process that as far as the bank is concerned student loan credit doesn't count, especially for first time buyers So they said we might as well have a credit score of less than 500 with the kind of credit we have. Lovely. Because of this our interest rate was more than double what we expected and we couldn't get as long term of a loan we were hoping for which meant that our monthly payment was going to be more than double what we were expecting. We still went ahead with it. We figured as long as we could sell the Blazer pretty quick we'd be fine and between the Blazer money and our tax return we'd have it paid off in 6 months even if between now and then we'd be pretty money tight.

I kept trying to convince myself that this was okay, but was super stressing about it because it would only be okay if we sold the Blazer pretty quick. The next day we took the Blazer to a guy in our ward who is pretty handy with cars. We thought if he could replace our radiator for pretty cheap it would help us to sell it for more money. He looked at it and told us that he thought it was fine. Yes, with the repairs that were made the natural thing to say is that the radiator would be the next thing to go, but that probably won't be necessary for another 5 to 10 years. With this news we decided we could go ahead and wait on getting a minivan until we were in a position to put a bigger down payment on it. The dealer we bought it from had a 3 day return policy so on Friday morning we returned it and got our money back and canceled the loan.

So the dream remains a dream for now. I told Robert, maybe this exact minivan will still be available in 6 months and they'll have docked the price even more since it's taken so long to sell. One can hope :)