I haven't done resolutions in several years, but one of my favorite fresh calendar rituals is copying my bill spreadsheet and renaming the file with the new year. It's one of the rare systems, financial or otherwise, that has gone the distance—I made my first one in 2015—and I think part of the reason is because I keep changing it to suit my needs. The 2023 version has a tab for bills, subscriptions, and loans. As I was updating the loans tab, I realized that this is the year we will pay off our Nissan LEAF.1
I love our car, even though it's a dinky little thing. The kids can bother one another in the backseat because they're too close together. We bought it used; it came with scratches and dings and it has even more now. We eat too many meals in it and it's always a little bit gross. Every time I give it a thorough cleaning I vow not to eat in it again but then we're driving between errands or appointments and the kids are screaming and we get them French fries and they get caught under the carseats and that's just life, isn't it?
My first car, which my mother gave to me when I got married in my early twenties, was a paid-off Mazda Protege. When I decided to leave my first husband, that car took me all over the country on a post-divorce solo road trip. Sadly I had to part ways with it in Atlanta when I rear-ended someone in stop-and-go traffic. There wasn't that much damage to it, really, the poor thing was just too old for the insurance company to write a check to save it.
That left me without a car as I was moving back to my hometown to accept a full-time job. A real one, with health insurance. (As a Millennial who graduated college in the peak of the Recession, that was not something I ever expected to achieve, since a lot of my college friends hadn't achieved it either.)
My cousin picked me up from the airport when I flew home and let me crash on his couch and borrow his car for a week while I figured everything out. I got an apartment, a shower curtain, a twin-sized air mattress, hangers for my clothes. But the biggest thing to figure out, obviously, was the car.
Listen, hashtag girlboss, but my dad was dead, I'd left my ex-husband in another state and I didn't know a single thing about cars. (Arguably I still don't.) My mother and my step-father connected me with a mechanic they trusted when they were still living in town. He was helping a widow sell a car, an old Camry, and in hindsight I probably should have bought it. After I test drove it, the mechanic popped the hood for me, presumably so I could look in and think to myself, "Ah yes, the car parts! Smashing." But a used car was too much of a question mark for me.
I knew that my cousin was not the most reliable person—this turned out to be accurate almost immediately—and that I was for the most part on my own and facing a rebuilding year. Then my cousin's girlfriend, planting a seed that would blossom into the biggest financial mistake of my life, told me that she was an ace at car shopping and she would help me buy one.
My Achilles heel is a confident person telling me they're going to take care of something. If she hadn't offered, I would have had a moment where I realized that I had to figure it out myself, likely with a lot of research. I know, because I've had that moment many times since. Instead, I told her the only thing I cared about was if the car could connect to my phone via Bluetooth. (A concern on my mind thanks to weeks of road tripping with one of those iPhone to FM transmitters that require an empty radio frequency to work.)
When I met her at the dealership, I was surprised to find that she'd already done all the talking. She clearly knew what she was doing (spoiler alert: she didn't) and after some minimal input from me, the salesman said that I would be looking at a $300 monthly payment. That was almost exactly what I was making as a freelance writer every month, so it seemed completely doable. I wouldn't even have to pay for the car out of my salary! Boom. Done. Decided.
You might not be surprised to discover that I paid pretty close to the sticker price. You might also not be surprised to discover (although I really, really was) that buying a new car is not necessarily the same thing as buying a reliable car. I was remarried with two kids when it started having issues less than three years later.
To make a long story short, all of the oil kept disappearing. After visiting two different mechanics I went to the dealership. (The scene of my greatest mistake, a place I hated to step inside.) One of the mechanics told me that he was going to level with me. It was likely that the oil was being burned away for some reason, and while the engine was under warranty, it was likely that I was going to have a hard time fighting to get it covered. He recommended that I take it to CarMax and see what they would offer me for it.
My husband and I play D&D and he jokes that if my real life personality had a signature move in the game it would be called You Know What? Essentially I'm out for a full round of combat but then come back swinging after thinking about it. I did not use this ability to fight the dealership. My son had just received his Autism diagnosis, my daughter was less than three months old. We went to Carmax. They offered me $5,000 for a car that I had a $7,267 loan on and I took it.
I think electric cars still read as fancy purchases for rich people, but we ended up with our LEAF because we needed something cheap. In 2017, a used electric car in a city with a huge urban sprawl was not desirable. It got about 90 miles on a full charge when we first bought it (less with the AC blasting or driving it on the freeway) which for most people in the Houston area is laughable. We took the $5,000 for the broken-down gas guzzler and took out another loan for $7,800 at a shockingly great 3.95% interest. (The average interest rate on a used car now is over twice that.) We were spending about $120 on gas in a month and the monthly payment worked out to $144 so we just about broke even.2
Now that we’ve had it for almost five years, the battery has degraded to 80% of its original capacity (an expected part of electric car ownership) and it gets about 70 miles on a full charge. It’s essentially like driving a car with a two-gallon fuel tank, only it takes anywhere from an hour to eight hours to refuel. The entire time we’ve owned it, we’ve never had a place to plug it at home. I rely on charging at work, but we have to charge at public chargers, too. As more people buy electric cars, they’re getting more crowded and we have to wait longer.
There’s a constant mental load of how charged the car is and how far we have to go and by what time and what will happen if someone is already at the charger or if the charger is broken. I currently have six different charging apps, some of which require you to refill $10.00 at a time.
I have a soft spot for Lief the LEAF. During the early pandemic it was another place to put the kids, who were still young enough that going for a ride counted as an activity when it was too hot or rainy to go outside. It’s a cheerful looking little thing with its angular headlights and charging-port-nose. But as we get closer to some of our bigger financial goals, it’s exciting to think that we might be able to start saving up for our next car soon. One where the kids will have more space in the backseat and my husband will have more legroom in the passenger seat. One that we can drive more than thirty miles away from home and not have to worry about what charger to use to get us back or what we’ll do while we wait.
One More Thing…
Of all the words to see on the CAPTCHA when I submitted our mid-year review for our SNAP benefits, which is basically an argument for why we still need financial assistance, this one felt a little on the nose?
Fun fact: LEAF is in all caps because it’s an acronym for Leading, Environmentally Friendly, Affordable, Family Car.
As for the original loan from the dealership for the gas guzzler, my inlaws took pity on us and paid it off. I've been paying them back $50 a month at 0% interest ever since. According to the bill spreadsheet, if nothing changes, I'll have paid them back in full by May of 2029. It’s an incredible position of privilege to have the biggest financial mistake of my life essentially erased on the whim of a sympathetic family member. This access is one of the reasons I refer to our family as broke, not poor.