Made my bed, and now I must sleep in it.

[YarisOwnersDad]

Folks:

We are here because we have a passion for cars. No one here has a greater passion for cars than I do, especially BRAND NEW cars.

I love to look at new cars, I love the new car smell, I love the thrill of the buying process and working the deal, I love to drive a new car, and I even enjoy washing a new car. I love everything about new cars. I even somewhat enjoy making the payments on new cars, believe it or not. Maybe that's because I feel that each payment that I make brings me that much closer to the next new car?

Here's the problem, though. I have done the "new car thing" WAY too many times in my lifetime, and I am now 60 years old and in debt up to my eyeballs.

I have refinanced my house several times over the years, and a lot of that money has gone toward new car purchases. At my age I should have my home paid for, but I am in debt up to the max on it, as if I had just bought the place. I have only the minimum required equity in my home, about 20%, after paying house payments for 32 years!

Why would a guy who has been so foolish publish something like this for the whole world to see? Well, it just may help to prevent someone else from being so foolish. I guess I wouldn't have listened, myself, though, if someone had told me all of this. People DID try to tell me that I was being foolish and would someday regret it. They were right.

Please do not fall into the trap that I did, which was to look ONLY at my ability to make the monthly payments. You have to look beyond the MONTHLY budget and see where you want to be down the road a few years. I was foolish enough to think that it was OK to trade cars as long as I could meet all of my monthly obligations. My wife would get very upset with me when I talked about trading, and I would say, "But it is ONLY $xxx.xx more per month than we are paying now." She would always remind me that we would just be staying in debt that much longer if I traded, but I would do it anyway. I know now that I should have listened to her.

There was nothing in my monthly budget for savings. They say you should "pay yourself first" when you get your paycheck, and by that they mean that you should put aside a certain amount of money for the future.

How am I supposed to retire in a few years, when I owe so much on my house and have a lot of credit card debt as well? You have heard the story about the grasshopper and the ant? Well, I have been the grasshopper, and I have nothing put away for the winter, and at 60 years of age, winter for me is just around the corner.

I was VERY good at getting the new cars at the lowest possible price. I knew how to do my research and knew how to negotiate. (Lord knows I had enough practice!) The problem was not that I was paying too much for my new cars, it was that I was trading WAY too often and building up way too much negative equity, carrying debt from one car loan over to the next one. At one point, I was signing my name on my third new car loan in 21 months! I had a brand new 99 Grand Cherokee that I kept for 13 months and then traded in on a 2000 Grand Prix that I kept for only 8 months before getting a 2001 Jeep Wrangler. FOOLISH!

OK, go ahead and flame away. I deserve it. But, I hope that just maybe there is one person out there who will read this and benefit by it.

Tom