Pun fully intended.

Last night, as my husband and I drove home together, I was feeling positive for the first time in months about our finances. Over the past year, we had built a small emergency fund, replaced one of our ugly, high-interest credit cards with a card with 7.99% APR, cut back on our expenses, and paid off thousands of dollars extra on our high-interest second mortgage. In addition, we expect a large tax refund this year (and yes, I know a tax refund is simply an interest-free loan to the federal government - but that’s a conversation for another day). I had changed my payroll allocations just that day so that I was putting $20 a month into savings, and we were about to schedule an appointment with our mortgage lender to see if we could refinance into a better interest rate. I held hands with Matt and thanked him for everything he had done to help our financial situation over the past year.

And then this morning…

… the brakes went out on the Tercel as Matt after he dropped me off at work today.

He said he could feel them “deflate.” He turned around and made it as far as the gas station at the intersection of Rte 2 and 2A before he felt it wasn’t safe to drive anymore, and then needed to get towed back to our mechanic.

The amateur mechanic in me suspects it’s the brake lines. This is a repair I’ve never had to make, so I have no idea how to judge the cost. I know that replacing a full set of disc brakes (pads, rotors, calipers) is more than we have in our emergency fund right now (ask me about why I hate disc brakes sometime!). Yes, I do have a tax refund on the way, too but the tax refund was meant to go towards future classes and/or the mortgage.

Plus fixing the Tercel is just postponing the inevitable - the car is 14 years old, after all. Eventually - it may not be today, or tomorrow, but eventually - we will have to make the difficult decision whether or not we want/need to replace it, when we want to do so, how we want to do so, and how much we’re willing to spend.

Some thoughts on this:

First of all, I hate driving. I hate cars. It’s taken me years of psych meds and therapy to get over this enough to actually drive on a regular basis (I’m so not kidding), so my gut reaction is to not replace the Tercel. The upsides of this are: it’s cheap and less stressful. No new (or used car purchase), no maintenance, no repairs. Living with one car, however, would be very difficult, especially when I resume taking classes towards the CS degree. Unfortunately, where I live, public transportation is a myth they tell to children to encourage them to move into Somerville. I’ve looked and looked at public transportation options, and they just don’t exist for where I need to go. The closest commuter rail is six miles from my house and like three miles from my job - a distance which is bikeable, perhaps, but bikes aren’t allowed on the trains! There’s no bus system that connects Worcester County with where I work. I signed up on a rideshare board, but haven’t found anyone else going my way.

So eventually we would probably need another car *sigh*. Aside from being objects of abject terror in my life, a car is possibly the worst “investment” one could make. Unless you enjoy working with cars - which I don’t - you might as well dig a pit and throw money into it. Vehicles are constantly losing value. You can buy a new car - and lose half its value the minute you drive it off the lot. You could buy a used car - and just lose that money more slowly. Throughout all of this, you have to maintain and repair the car, too. You can lease, and end up throwing away more money than the car is worth into the process. But given that cars are worth crap, that’s not saying much. The general “buzz” on leasing is that it’s a bad, bad idea, but many of the people telling me this are the same people who goaded me into buying a house when I wasn’t ready, so! If the conventional wisdom on house ownership is wrong, then I suspect the conventional wisdom on car ownership may be, too.

And then there’s the scam known as the auto loan. In addition to the fact that car dealerships make most of their money on loans, and some auto loans don’t even allow you to pay down the principal off-schedule, you are loaning money for something that loses value. When you borrow money for something that generally gains value - such as land - that’s called leverage. An auto loan is, like, anti-leverage then. It only has the potential to land you in a bad spot. Knowing this, I looked forward to buying my next car - if I do buy - with cash. If I’m going to have to buy my next car soon, however, that looks a lot less possible.

I need to start doing research on my options - but I can’t shake the feeling that, when it comes to cars, there’s no good option.