If you are like 75-80% of Americans or the Jones, you live paycheck to paycheck  and haven’t saved for a rainy day or invested for retirement. The top two reasons you haven’t is sitting in your driveway, in your stomach (or on your hips) in the form of eating out.

That was certainly our reality a few years ago. We had a brand new pickup sitting in the garage, but could hardly afford to put gas in it. Ben was constantly worried about providing for a family with one average paycheck.  My how times have changed in our wheat field.  Ben still works his same job, but when it comes to money our behavior is different. We just got done making a whirlwind trip to Oklahoma to pick up a pickup that we paid cash for. (The third vehicle we’ve done this with.) We used the principles we learned in Dave Ramsey’sFinancial Peace University class to track down, dicker for and finally drive away with a new truck. New to us anyway, everyone knows a car’s value drops like a rock. Right? I mean faster than granny can lose her falsies playing poker.

Cash for clunkers was a waste. As with ever other government program, in the end it hurt the tax-payer, hurt small businesses and gave more power to the government. According to CNN 17% of the participants who followed the socialist Pied Piper of Washington to the car lots in August had regrets of  trading in perfectly good vehicles and signing up for a payment, higher taxes and insurance. The big surprise was more gas money gets spent driving their nice new car. Tell me. How was that a good idea?

Before you use every excuse we used to use to drive a new car like… “Car payments are just a way of life. I need something reliable. I need something safe to haul kids around in.”..watch this video about how to drive free cars the rest of your life.

Get what your car is worth by selling it privately. Don’t trade it. Period. Dealers are experts at making you think you got a good deal. Remember they are in this to make money and they buy at wholesale and sell at retail. Learn their tricks and use them when you buy privately.

Research your next vehicle while your waiting for your car to sell. We used Consumer Reports, Edmonds, Kelly Blue book, and others to research reliability, market values, and safety ratings.

Buy gently used.Let the first owner take the huge hit on the depreciation for the new car smell. According to Dave Ramsey “it’s like throwing a hundred dollar bill out the window of your new car every week.” Doesn’t that thought make you want to hurl?

Find your car by searching Craigslist, newspapers, Ebay, repo auctions, bank parking lots, word of mouth etc. We have even talked to small dealers about finding what we want at auction and paying them $500-1000 over what they can buy them for. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box, that’s usually where you save money.

Have a mechanic look at it and drive it. Even if it costs you $30-50 dollars, it would be better than buying a lemon. While they’re looking ask questions and pick their brain. Do you work on these much? Is that engine a good one? Do these transmissions last? What vehicles do you work on the least?

Never pay asking price, dicker. I love doing this. I wrote about how to do it and not do it here. Ben usually lets me dicker because it’s not his forte. While we are doing the good-cop/bad-cop thing he has been know to say, “I know, Man, you ought to try to live with her.” It’s all in fun and part of our evil plan, but it works. So let the dicker er er in the family do it.

Getting a different car is time consuming and frustrating. It takes focus and perseverance, but in the end can save you big time. We figure we saved $3000 in the month it took us to sell one and buy another. Since I don’t work much outside the home, I figure that is my paycheck. For the time I put into it, I madesaved hundreds of dollars an hour. Certainly nothing to sneeze at. With savings like that, we can afford to do recommended maintenance and fix problems once in a while.

Simply,

Sis