Our Car

We’ve had our car, an ’85 Porsche 944, for 21 years. We’re emotionally attached to it. We don’t drive that much (it only has about 134,000 miles on it) but when we do drive, in our Porsche we feel like we’re in a classy machine. They only made the 944 for about 5 years so people often see it and ooh and aah about it. It’s on the way to being a valuable antique, but at this point even though it looks in near-pristine condition in reality it’s just an old car and not worth much.

We’ve never given a thought to getting rid of even though in the past couple of years we’ve had some expensive repair bills. I mean really expensive. Since we just assumed we’d fix it if something went wrong we didn’t stop to figure out how much it was costing us until it was too late. And then we were shocked. The total in the past two years has been $11K. That’s ridiculous! We should have stopped and realized what was going on. But we didn’t.

I have a sense that more repairs are in the offing, although I don’t know that for sure. Just a feeling. As I contemplated this possibility I began to reach a conclusion: no way am I willing spend more on our antique. Turns out Sandra has come to same conclusion even though we hadn’t discussed it. I knew when she gave me an article on buying new cars on the Internet yesterday.

I’m pretty clear that if we get a new car I want to buy a hybrid, probably a Prius, but maybe a Honda. I went online to check them out. Both look and sound really hot. We’ve agreed that if we get a new car it’ll need to be not too expensive, on the small side, and economical. These hybrids fit our thinking.

I’m not sure where this is going to lead. I do wonder though, should we pay cash or finance it?