Alright Internet friends I need your advice.
Here are the facts:
Chris and I have a car that we paid £300.00 for a year ago. It has been a great car and we've not had any problems with it. It has around 84,000 miles on it, which is quite good considering it is a car made around 1994.
I finally got my license and right now we are tying to get the car up and running. So far we've paid £109.00 for a new exhaust for it and today we got back from the mechanics and we are looking at another £300.00 to fix it before it can be taxed (tax is £66.00).
The lovely mechanic said that he'd do us a payment plan (£40.00 a week) until paid off.
So we could pay to get the car fixed (more than we paid for it and HEFTY weekly repayments)
OR...
We could go down to the car dealership, trade in the car we have now for parts and get a newer car for LESS than we would be paying to sort out the car.
This means we'd be in debt for the car and add to our budget another chunk of money.
So what do you think? Should we pay to fix the car we have now, or should we cut our losses and get a newer car with less repairs??
What do you think?
5 comments:
That is always the hard question! We confronted that with Wes' car a couple of years ago. It just wasn't worth sinking more money into his "jelly bean" car. We dediced to buy a newer, used car. We got a bad deal in the end though. Blah! But we did learn from our experience to research, research, research and not be talked into anything!
Here is another question too..are you moving back to the states? Would it be hard to bring your new car back with you?
Thanks Liz! We are moving to the states, but we dont know when - and since the car dealership is right in the town we live in, we are figuring we would just try to sell it back to them - that would be a loss, I'm sure - so just one more thing to consider!! Also, if we financed the car we would only go for a 2 year loan, not the normal 5, and hopefully get a big chunk of it paid off :)
Oh heck, it's like saying "Should I jump off this cliff with the cactus at the bottom or this cliff with the big rocks at the bottom?" What do you really want to do? Choose the less painful option and.....get the newer car that would be less. Less is always more.
How often do you think you'll be repairing this car of yours? We were having to repair our Chevy Blazer about twice a year, paying about a grand each time. Sure the car was paid off, and the repairs were less expensive than a new car payment. But after 5 years of doing this, we finally traded the american car in for a reliable Toyota. I know the repairs will cost more if and when they come along, but they'll be far and few in between.
If you can swing it go for the new car!
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