Aug 5, 2006

The Big Day!

I took Sneedlet to the mall playground today. This is the relevant portion of a picture of one of the moms supervising her child. I hated it when my mom would go out in public with her boobs hanging out. Fortunately, this woman's kid is still too young to be mortified. The picture is a little grainy because I didn't want her husband to pound me senseless, so I retreated to a safe distance. I think it is time for the "good taste" police to pay a visit to the playground and start handing out citations. And now, our feature story. The lovely Mrs. Sneed admires her paid for car. On 6/20/2005 the lovely Mrs. Sneed bought herself a brand new Honda Pilot to haul the Sneedlets around in. She had been driving a 1999 Honda Accord, which was a fabulous car, but was on the small side. In 6 years she only put 45,000 miles on it, so it was still very new. We shopped around quite a bit for an SUV before finding this one. We had some sleazy character at one Honda place explain to us that we would have to pay around $34,000 for a Pilot because they are so popular. We looked at the Saturn VUE, but they seemed sort of junky inside. We had kind of settled on a Toyota Highlander, but the Toyota guys were total buttheads. Besides they only had one Highlander on the lot and wanted up to pay big for the extras they had loaded on it. I will not deal with our other Toyota dealer because they are just too creepy. Our Pilot sort of fell into our lap. One Sunday afternoon I googled Honda Pilot +our fair city and a listing for the Pilot we eventually bought came up. It was the right color at a price lower than we had seen anywhere else. The hitch was that it was a place that sells higher end used cars, so I was wary about why they had a new Pilot for sale. I drove over to the lot and sure enough they had it. I called the guy on Monday and that evening we drove it home. As an aside, he said that he bought four new Pilots from a Honda dealer that had too many in stock and got a major deal on them. Another of Merle's rules for life is, when buying something time is your friend and the enemy of the seller. Take your time. The MSRP on the Pilot we bought was $31,200. We actually paid $27,500 for it. With tax, license, etc., it came to $30,518. We sold the Accord to the niece of a friend for $9000. We added $5000 to the $9000 and financed $16,518 for 4 years at 5.75%. The regular monthly payment was $386. The lovely Mrs. Sneed made a vow to pay it off in 12 easy payments of $1376. It actually took her 13 months, but today was the day she paid it off. She sent me to the credit union today with a check for $1040.78, the remaining balance. It turned out that $2.30 had accurred in interest since her last payment so I had to kick that in. I'm always having to bail her out! The teller took the money and said to me, "Wow, an '05 car that is paid off, that's awesome!" Evidently, car debt is so ingrained in us that having no debt on a new car is newsworthy. Of course it is awesome and the lovely Mrs. Sneed has reason to be proud of her efforts. We took the Pilot to daughter Sneed's today and I believe it drove smoother and got better mileage. It only has 8800 miles on it, so we expect another 10 years of good service and of course, no payments. According to Kelly Blue Book, the wholesale value of the Pilot is $26,200 and the retail value is $32,970. Pretty cool. It doesn't get any better than that. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong and sometimes just full of it. Tag:

1 comment:

Kurt said...

I like leasing. That's a way to really throw your money away fast!