I got my first car when I was 18. I searched far and wide to find something different, something just for me. I ended up finding a purple 1998 Dodge Dakota. It had 190,000 miles on it and it wasn’t perfect, but it was perfect for me! I loved it! He was lovingly named Barney for his color. I was lucky enough that my grandpa bought it for me and I didn’t have any payments.

In the next 3 years I moved from California to Kansas to Colorado. Barney served me well. Going to college, getting married and then making my first big adult move to Denver. My job in Colorado was a 30 minute drive from my apartment. I wanted something that would get better gas mileage. So I stupidly traded my truck for a 2000 Pontiac Grand Am. Don’t get me wrong, I liked that car, but I got it off craigslist and I didn’t get it inspected by a mechanic first. I had it for about 6 months, put new tires on it (charged of course) and even drove it all the way to Indiana and back with a busted heater in the middle of winter. I filled my wiper fluid one time and the next day it overheated on my way to work. It was literally freezing out! Like 28 degrees freezing and my car was OVERHEATING! I took it to the closest shop near my work, it just happened to be a Toyota dealership. 🙄

I got a call while I was at work that my radiator would need flushed multiple times because there was fluid in there that froze…. yeah, I did that. To this day I’m not sure exactly how. I’m no expert, but I used to do basic maintenance on my truck without messing that up. Anyways, he said it would be $179 per flush and it would need to happen a couple times to get it all out. Of course I didn’t have the money or a credit card to put that on. Then they let me know that it wouldn’t really be worth it because the block was cracked. So I had to figure out how I was going to get to work, so what did I do? I bought a darn car.

I did my research and I ended up getting a 2011 Toyota Camry. Y’all, I was so proud. I bought a car all by myself! No co-signer, or down payment. I felt like a real grownup! I signed a 72 month loan agreement for $18,888. I thought I did so good! I’d had it for about a month when my husband decided he wanted something new too. But we were upside down in his car loan so we couldn’t use it as a trade in. So what did we do? We bought the darn $35,000 truck anyways! We used our payment for his car that month as a down payment! 🤦‍♀️

His car then ended up on a 90 day roll over late payment. Then ended up getting impounded for a whole month for expired plates…

You guys, we were young and DUMB! We had 3 vehicles that we had payments on totaling $1400 a month! We finally got his old car sold, so we were down to just our two.

Last year when we moved to Pennsylvania, as I mentioned, we didn’t find jobs as easy as we had expected. Both our vehicles were on the Repo list and we lived in fear. Finally we got some jobs worked out and got current on those.

With me having our daughter and deciding to stay home, I knew we would have to cut costs somewhere to actually make ends meet. I’d heard Dave Ramsey say it many times, I just didn’t think it applied to me. “Sell the car,” he says over and over again. One day I woke up and decided to see how much my car was worth compared to how much I owed on it. I was excited to see it was worth a good deal more than what I owed. So I played with the idea of selling it. By that afternoon, I had made up my mind. I listed it for sale that week.

I told my parents what I was doing and my mom came up with the idea of my sister buying it. She needed the car and it made everyone feel comfortable knowing where it came from and where it was going. So on Thanksgiving, I sold my car to my sister.

I was not only able to pay off my car, but I also paid off a credit card and my student loan! I paid off $10,000 worth of debt in November!

It is my goal to be debt free by the end of 2019!