Hey Friends, guess what?
We got rid of our car! Yep, our much beloved VW Golf is gone. It took care of us for 4 years, and brought us to lots of amazing adventures. But, the lease was up the same day as our house possession.. so it was a busy day for us!
** financial disclosure: The Golf was leased for 4 years, and cost us $979 to return for some minor repairs and admin fees, ouch **
In the meantime - we’ve been driving our van. And while suuuper handy, it’s been a bit of a weird adjustment. Excuse me while I go all ‘first world problems’ on you here: Driving a nice car like the golf was quite reflective of our lifestyle and status in this city. Now, cruising around in a sketchy van - it’s a tactile adjustment and our first taste of ‘less possessions’. We knew it was going to happen, but having to let go of your ego in even the smallest of ways is an interesting shift in view. Just trying to be honest with you.
We’ve been staying with family in the ‘burbs for a couple of weeks, but next weekend we’re heading back downtown to stay with friends in an apartment. It’s going to be great to get our commute down to just a few minutes, but now we don’t want to deal with the expense of parking - so we’re selling the van (yeay money!) and signed up for an awesome new car sharing program to get us through the next couple of months!
Car2Go is a great program that we heard about on twitter (@danadebrito).We get to rent smart cars by the minute to use whenever/wherever we want! It’s all app based for finding the cars, parking and gas is all included, and it’s charged automatically to our credit cards. We signed up at an event so our registration was free (yeay free!) but I think it’s usually about $35/year.
We made a lot of sacrifices for our upcoming trip, selling pretty much all of our furniture, and even our much loved scooters. But the one thing we could not part with was our car... While we know we could have made about 20k selling it, it is fully paid off, and on the offchance we need/want a car upon our return from our trip, there is no way we could get an equally nice car for whatever money we would make selling our current one. In the end, any money we made selling our car we would have wanted to sock away for potentially purchasing a new car, so given that the money wouldn't have even really gone towards our trip, we decided it just didn't make sense to sell it!
ReplyDeleteYep... it all comes down to what makes sense for your trip! Since our golf was leased, and we have no place to park the van ~ They're all gone!
DeleteWhat a cool program! I had never heard of it before!!!
ReplyDeleteI sold my car to help pay for my trip too... luckily I live in Vancouver where the public transit is pretty good. I used to have Car2Go too! Fantastic idea. Glad you guys are popping stuff off the Champagne List :)
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