New car

So, since I thoroughly thrashed the Ion, we started looking for a new vehicle. We'd been talking about possibly getting a minivan for some time - well before the accident - since we now have a newborn, and will possibly have another in a couple of years, and seating room could become scarce. We looked over a few, and finally decided that, well, the gas mileage just wasn't what we really needed. That basically left us with large cars.

Bridget was in love with the PT Cruiser, and we almost bought one a couple of years ago. The Chevy HHR was similar enough to it, so we compared them and finally came to the conclusion that, despite outward appearances, they weren't that much larger than the Ion on the interior.

Eventually, we found a beautiful blue 2006 Chevy Impala that I fell in love with, and the price was just fantastic. I spoke to the dealership in Shreveport several times about the vehicle, Bridget got a loan from her credit union, and we were all set to go buy the car yesterday afternoon. Except they'd sold it.

Thankfully, I found this out on the phone before we'd left. So we looked around some more, and found several 2007 Impalas at another Shreveport dealership that were the same price as the 2006 we'd been looking at. Bridget, now faced with the impending decision of buying a new car RIGHT NOW, was kind of freaking out, and called her parents to be assured that, yes, this was a good decision.

We drove to the dealership today, after speaking to a salesman several times last night, and looked at several models. We settled on a bronze one - the only real differences between all of them was the color, and white we just did NOT want (side note - the white ones were the only that were supposed to be sold at the price we were quoted, the others were supposed to be $1000 more - the sales guy just went with it when I asked).

The next part was the really cool part - we had some extra stuff we wanted to purchase - GAP coverage, and the extended warranty since this one's warranty mileage was almost up. We had calculated a base amount that would cost us, based on what it had cost us on the Ion - a little over $2000 for the warranty and $600 for the GAP.

First, though, they beat the APR we had for the loan from Bridget's credit union. Then, the warranty on the car was almost $500 less than on the Ion. Our monthly payments ended up being less than we'd anticipated. It was a great experience.

And here's our new car.