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We are officially a mutli-mazda vehicle driving family! We said good-bye to the '95 Windstar yesterday, and after WAY too many hours in the dealership with my husband and children we returned home with a 2001 Mazda MPV (it's a smaller sized mini van for those of you who are like me and don't know one car from another).

We actually picked it up on Monday and took it home Monday night but decided to take it back to the lot and spend the day looking for something else instead. However, when we took it back to the lot they knocked the price down an additional $600 (it was listed at $3500 above what we walked away with it for).

It's a great car, with great mileage (75K) and it's rated really well. It's an amazing value, considering our payment is nearly $4000 below retail Kelly Blue Book and we were able to trade in a van that we know is virtually worth nothing, being that the cost of upcoming repairs exceeds the value of the van...

However, there's a reason it's such a cheap van. It has a fairly significant amount of body damage. There is damage to both bumpers and each door of the van. A lot of the damage is little scratches, though there's a big gouge, a small dent and the bumper damage. It kind of looks like someone played bumper cars with it, or drove it into blackberry bushes, or tried to squeeze between 2 trees unsuccessfully. Really, it's hard to fathom what might have happened. You can't necessarily tell until you get up-close and personal with the van, but the damage is there.

Anyway, that's why we were willing to walk away from the van and why they continued to drive down the price. They finally got it to a point that my common sense out did my vanity and we decided to buy the car even though it means I have a scratched and dented vehicle. We would be looking at spending several thousand more dollars for a car that isn't as well rated with at least 25K more miles on it if we were to continue our search. So, we bit the bullet. We bought the van.

We could get many or even most of the scratches out for about $500 (unless I have any secret blog readers who fix body damage?), but it would be costly to replace the bumpers. So, hopefully at some point we can get the majority of the scratches out and just have to contend with the bumper damage.... (unless we can find some bumpers at a scrap yard and I have any blog readers who can do that too!)

So, the good news is that we're done car shopping and we got something that seems like it might not be a money pit. We got it for less than were looking at spending on anything else. We really wanted something built in the 21st century and less than 100K.

The bad news is that for the first time in our lives we had to take out a car payment. We just bought Rob's car last summer, and had no means to pay cash for this one (unless we wanted another money-pit car). We have totally mixed feelings about this. We don't want to have any debt, especially not on a depreciating asset. However, the monthly payment is less than the amount that we've been putting into repairs of our older vehicles. So, financially it made sense... but it goes against our philosophy and goals of being debt-free. In fact, just before the latest car woes we were making plans to scrape to pay Rob's student loans off more quickly, so we could roll that over into paying off my loans more quickly so we could be debt-free. Now, we've added more money to that never-ending debt snowball but such is life. We'll continue to make meager efforts toward being debt-free no matter how long and painful that process is!

Bottom-line? I'm done. No more dealerships, no more Craigslist, no more AutoTrader. No more Consumer Reports, no more how to shop for used car articles, no more dragging the kids in and out of vehicles and dealerships. No more wasted time. No more loan shopping. No more wondering what we should get. No more worrying that the van would die before we found a new car thus making our trade in worth nothing. No more car vs. van questioning, no more car stress. Until one of our cars breaks down that is :0)