by Hope
I bet that headline made most of you gasp and think, oh what has she done! Rest assured, this was pure fun with no buying intentions and it was SO MUCH FUN! Every Wednesday the Princess and I have about an hour and a half of girl time in between dropping off and picking up various brothers at various places. We normally go somewhere and get a soda or snack and catch up, do some tutoring or just goof off together. But this week, I just really didn’t want to spend money and frankly, was pretty bored of our norm. So I suggested we go look at cars!
With the twins so close to driving on their own, there’s lots of talk about dream cars and wishlists, etc. So her dream car when she can drive is a Mini Cooper. I personally have no experience with them so thought it would be a fun, free way to spend our time. We chose a CarMax location on the way to our next pick up and stopped there for about an hour. We walked in and told the salesperson we were just looking and he directed us to the Mini Coopers. Wow, that was so much fun! We got in each one, in the front, in the back, she sometimes even got in the trunk. We pressed all the buttons, discussed looks and uses. And after we finished there…
We went ALL over their lot, getting in cars, reading tags, sitting in cars and talking about whatever came to mind. I thought I would get all “I’ve got to have this” or “this is going to be my next car” BUT I wasn’t. Looking at the 1000s of dollars in each price just made me sick to my stomach. So we had a really great time, and she does still want a Mini Cooper after now sitting in several. But I am in no rush to buy another car. What a change for me!
One other thing that came out of it, was the math of buying a car in cash. She has about 5 1/2 years til she can drive independently. So she picked out her favorite Mini and we sat down together and did the math on how much she would have to save in the approximately 66 months until she can drive. It came out to saving $200 month. What a great way for her to see the cost of a car.
We will definitely be doing this again, and I will be taking the boys for the same exercise. They will get to sit in all the cars they want, pick their favorite and then we will work on the math for 1) buying a car in cash and 2) financing a car with different interest rates. Not only will it be a GREAT math lesson but more importantly a life lesson that could last a life time and save them some of the errors that I have made.
So my recommendation…take your kids car shopping!
Hope is a creative, solutions-focused business manager helping clients grow their business and work more efficiently by leveraging expertise in project management, digital marketing, & tech solutions. She’s recently become an empty nester as her 5 foster/adoptive kids have spread their wings. She lives with her 5 dogs in a small town in NE Georgia and prefers the mountains to the beaches any day. She struggles with the travel bug and is doing her best to help each of her kids as their finish schooling and become independent (but it’s hard!) She has run her own consulting company for almost twenty years! Hope began sharing her journey with the BAD community in the Spring of 2015 and feels like she has finally in a place to really focus on making wise financial decisions.
What a fun idea. 66 months of saving puts things in perspective, many people get loans for that long, and longer these days for twice that amount. And that’s a perfect real world lesson showing how much interest someone would pay on a loan like that.
That is great! I think this will help your kids in adulthood more than you know. In our household everything was paid for in cash and so I don’t understand why you would do anything different. Early on this meant much more modest and older cars, but we haven’t bought a vehicle for 15 years (last cars bought fairly new) and all we do is save $100/month per vehicle. After 15 years that is $18,000 saved for just one vehicle, which is twice as much as we spent on our last car! (I feel like the impression is that paying cash is a huge financial commitment, but the opposite is true. How about a perpetual $100/month car payment into your savings account? IT’s barely noticeable. We will probably have enough next time to buy a barely used luxury vehicle).