After spending several summer weeks browsing sweltering car lots, test-driving fancy new models and listening to sales pitches (could car salesmen’s offices be any more dreary, btw?), I was ready to buy my first car: A Silver Subaru Outback 2.5i Premium with all-wheel drive (standard), all-weather package and moon roof.  (Insert dreamy swoon here.)

After making the choice of vehicle, I spent about a week drooling over the glossy booklet pondering add-ons such as trailer hitches and bike racks, and wondering exactly how often I would use my heated seats (!), while my trusty research assistant B was busy sending me links on how to prepare for a car purchase and negotiation points. He also managed to check inventories at nearly every Subaru lot in the nearby Chicago/Wisconsin/Indiana area and got in touch with no less than five dealers to inquire about the status of their vehicles and see who would offer us the sweeter package.

I finally managed to turn my attention to finances. My goal was to keep the vehicle under $26,000 before taxes. After much belabored conversation with friends and family, I decided that I would put down $15,000 on the day of purchase – a decision that made most people choke on their drinks and one that I’m sure will be controversial here, but I weighed my options carefully. I have been saving since I started this blog (you can read some of my early 2004 posts to read about my first savings account deposit) and my accounts have been steadily growing. I could have bought the car outright, but that would have taken too much out of my savings account for near-term (within five years) purchases such as a house and wedding. So, I opted to keep my reserves healthy and put down $15,000 vs. buying the car outright – using online calculators, we figured that this would keep my monthly payments under $300, which is about what I was paying each month on my student loans.  I essentially managed to keep my budget the same as it’s been for years by swapping the student loan for a car loan.  I knew that financing was cheap, and if I could just qualify for the lowest rates, I would stay true to my plan.

So I knew what I wanted, and how much I wanted to pay. Based on some advice found on Carbuyingtips.com and Edmunds.com, I began assembling a bulky folder filled with all my financial information, quotes from local dealers in the Illinois/Wisconsin/Indiana area, and all the e-mails I had ever exchanged with those dealers.

One of the handiest items I kept in the folder was my credit score and credit reports from Equifax and TransUnion. I went to www.myfico.com (with a coupon code, of course) and paid a small fee for access to my credit score. I was delighted to find out that after years of obsessively monitoring my bills, saving, making payments on time and learning about credit, I am in the highest percentile of credit scores (only 13 percent of Americans can say the same). Armed with this knowledge, I was ready to negotiate.

Rather than deal in person or by phone, we started e-mailing salespeople. It’s harder for them to claim they didn’t promise something when you have a record for every interaction. The quotes we received, with all our options and including freight charges, dealer fees, tax, title and license charges, ranged from $25,948 to $28,443 across four different dealers. $25,948. I had my car.

We confirmed that I would be eligible for 2.9% financing for 48 months, haggled over a few last options, and then set a date. Then, we planned a trip to the dealer.

The morning of my very first car purchase, I awoke excited. I wore a skirt, packed up my folder, and tried to calm my nerves. For some reason I was very nervous, like I was about to run my first triathlon.

When we arrived, my nerves turned into annoyance. The salesman had been to a bachelor party the night before, and presumably because B and I look kind of young, he felt compelled to tell us repeatedly how hung over he was. It was a hot July day and he was sweating profusely, with a bottle of Gatorade next to him at all times. He didn’t have the extras we negotiated ready when we arrived, and actually tried to weasel out of a few of them, but we had our folder of emails to show him his promises. (Plus we had B’s intimidating height and deep voice, and my serious eyebrows, as I mentioned in the previous post.) We assured him we had three other motivated dealers (and had the emails as proof) ready to sell us the same vehicle. Ultimately, he gave us everything he promised us, for the price he promised us.

The rest of the afternoon was a sea of paperwork and odd dealings with mostly balding men in short-sleeved button-down shirts and ties. We had to sit in a waiting room, then watch a power point about acid rain (on a PC at a sales rep’s desk) and sign some papers confirming we did NOT need a specialized coating on the car. Then back to the waiting room. Then back into another office, this one without windows and occupied by an ancient-looking temp who processed our loan paperwork and mistook my down payment as “Fifteen-hundred” instead of “Fifteen-thousand.” I got the impression he was surprised that a woman my age had that much to put down (honestly).  Actually I got the impression that no one at the dealer had ever dealt with a woman before, they all were so awkward. I didn’t see one other lady there. They may want to work on that.

After more awkward waiting, the car was ready. My hung-over dealer brought it around in the hot sun and turned on the air full-blast to compensate for his crazy sweating. I thanked him, promised to be kind on his post-purchase survey and hoped never to see him again. The car was all mine (well, mostly mine, technically it’s owned by the loan company until I pay it all off).

B took off in his old Mitsubishi and I followed him home, but before I did, I turned on the radio. The first song in my new Subaru? One of my favorites of all time, Eddie Vedder singing “Hide Your Love Away.”  I won’t soon forget the perfection of that moment, of me sitting alone in my first car in the sun, dressed up, listening to Eddie Vedder on the radio and enjoying some peaceful, air-conditioned quiet-time before my first solo drive in the new car – basking in the afterglow of a well-researched, well-negotiated purchase that I worked hard for.

The post My first car: A major purchase update in three parts (PART 3) appeared first on The Budgeting Babe.

Once I determined that I wanted to buy a car, I enlisted my man-friend, B, to serve as my stoic sidekick on this epic journey. Not only had he bought a car before, he is also very tall and can be slightly intimidating to outsiders. Given the combination of my stellar “serious eyebrow” face and his height, I assumed it would be difficult for anyone to best us in negotiations. Also, since B would be using the car like I had used his Eclipse for the last 10 years, he volunteered to do a lot of the research for the purchase.

My first step was to narrow down the choices. I knew that I needed something big enough to hold bikes, camping gear, ski trip baggage and more. Yet, fuel efficiency was very important to me. The vehicle also needed to handle well in extreme weather; we get a lot of ice and snow in Chicago, and so 4-wheel or all-wheel drive was a necessity to me. And, for my vanity items, I wanted a sunroof for the nice days and heated seats for the frigid days. And I had a price range in mind: I didn’t want to spend more than $26,000 before taxes. I narrowed the field down to small/mid-sized SUVs, specifically the following: Subaru Forrester, Honda CR-V, Hyundai Santa Fe or Tuscon, Toyota RAV4.

I did consider leasing as an option, and buying a used car. But since I want to keep the car around for 10 years, just like B’s old one, buying new was more appealing to me. Plus, the interest rates advertised at the time were between one and three percent for well-qualified buyers, so the cost of an auto loan to buy the car outright was ridiculously cheap (a friend with good credit who bought her car two years prior got an interest rate near seven percent on a used car).

One more consideration was buying American. I did go to car lots and look at new Ford, Chevy, and GM models. But I really didn’t like the body styles on a lot of them. They all seemed so big and flashy – they also appeared to be built more on a truck foundation vs. a car.  Plus, some of them were assembled in Canada and Mexico – negating the “buy American” concept in the first place. And finally, I asked some business school graduates about buying American. If the cars are made elsewhere and the investors are global, what’s the benefit of buying American vs. a foreign car that’s assembled in the US? The answers were unconvincing. In the end, buying American was not the deciding factor for me.

So back to my purchase; I had settled on a mid-sized/small SUV. B and I spent a several weeks during the summer checking out car lots all over northern Illinois.  We typically went on a Sunday, when the dealerships were closed and no salesman would be around. It was an unbearably hot summer here, and there were days when we fried on the black top parking lots. But we felt it was important to see the cars in person, check out the available inventory, review the price tags on the windows, and see a variety of models in person. Sometimes the internet just doesn’t do a car justice, and I’m easily distracted by flash animation.

After I felt comfortable enough being around car lots, I was ready to take on test drives. We decided to test drive a number of vehicles at our local AutoBarn, which had many of the models I was interested in. I thought I was going to fall in love with the Subaru Forrester. Instead, I found myself drawn to the Subaru Outback. It was just as fuel-efficient as our Mitsubishi Eclipse, was made at the Indiana plant (with zero landfill status), held its value over time, earned excellent reviews from auto press and glowing recommendations from every Subaru owner I spoke with, came standard with all-wheel drive, and included an all-weather package with moonroof, heated seats, and more for under $26,000 before taxes and fees. Plus, it was fun to drive. During the test drive, I confess, I was a little too enthusiastic… B reminded me that hard-nosed negotiators with serious eyebrows don’t say things like “I can totally see myself taking this baby on a road trip!” while the salesman is in the car. Duly noted.

Once I had settled on the Subaru Outback, the next step was simple, right? I just needed to buy the car!

(Stay tuned for Part 3: Subaru Outback FTW! – or some similar title, coming later this week.)

The post My First Car: A Major Purchase Update, in Three Parts (PART 2) appeared first on The Budgeting Babe.

At 28, I passed my first driver’s exam. Upon hearing this news, I cried. In the car. With the instructor.  I gave my dad a thumbs up from behind the wheel. Standing outside the DMV, he began to tear up.

My dad is not a crier. I think there have only been three other times in my life when I’ve seen him cry. But getting a license had been a long journey for me. I took the exam at age 16, and again at age 21. I began to think I would never drive. Getting my license was my Mount Everest. And my dad is a car guy, so seeing his oldest child earn her license after more than 10 years of trying (ok, half-hearted trying) was surely monumental. I was a licensed driver. We celebrated over brunch at a diner. The world rejoiced at the magnificence of my accomplishment.

At 31, I undertook another previously unimaginable feat. I bought a car. Here is my harrowing story, the first of three parts (because blog writing is supposed to be short and I wasn’t blogging when this epic saga unfolded).

…

I had been thinking about buying a car for at least a year. I was previously exclusively driving my man-friend’s 2000 Mitsubishi Eclipse, affectionately named Carmen. Carmen was 10 years old, and though we loved that spiffy little silver firecracker and she was totally paid off, lately she was requiring monthly repairs – she needed new breaks, she had cracks in her underside, the engine was overheating regularly, and on and on. We were spending $500 here, $200 there. I started to question the value of making monthly repairs vs. making new car payments. Why sink so much money into something that only had a couple years left?

I had a few other reasons for wanting a new car. Carmen wasn’t reliable enough to take on road trips anymore. And since we use the train to commute to work daily, our car only serves two purposes: running errands locally, and traveling long distances. Furthermore, now that we’ve been doing more active pursuits like biking and triathlons, we were always borrowing my mom’s SUV (a Hyundai Santa Fe) for our road trips.  Carmen could only fit two people and a few bags in the trunk. Putting a hitch on to haul cargo wasn’t an option; she rode so low I tore skirt seams getting in and out of the car. And roof racks aren’t made to go with an eclipse. By last Spring, we were putting the money into repairs simply to run errands.

Around the same time that Carmen was sputtering, I finished payment on my student loans (hurrah!). I knew we needed a car, and I had some additional disposable income. The timing couldn’t have been better. I was about to do the unthinkable: my quest for a new car had begun.

(Stay tuned for Part II: Exploration (aka. Shopping Around) coming tomorrow…)

The post My First Car: A Major Purchase Update, in Three Parts Because Blogs Are Short…. appeared first on The Budgeting Babe.