We just came home with a 2019 Subaru Legacy, which is exciting, but also frustrating since I think we've averaged a car purchase every 2 years since we've been together.
(We're so over this that, for the first time, we have everything warrantied past 100,000 miles in hopes that we can pause on vehicle trading for some time!)
As I drove it home I reflected that there were a lot of lessons packed in to this whole experience.
1) You get what you pay for.
We sold our beloved Audi (our 'Treat yo'self' in 2021 upon returning home to the U.S., and sort of a career milestone celebration for me) because it wasn't only inappropriate for our 16-year-old to be driving, but it wasn't purring like it used to and was getting up there in miles. Audis are expensive to repair - an oil change typically cost around $300.
We "replaced" it with a 2010 Kia Soul that I bought with cash off an outbound foreign exchange Naval War College student headed back to his home country, Latvia. Scratched, dented, tiny and working, it seemed like the perfect vehicle in which our new driver could putt around Aquidneck Island and to/from school.
Until one piece after another started failing due to the undercarriage being completely rusted out, the tire pressure light never extinguishing despite trouble shooting and repair, and the recent realization that the suspension was shot.
Which leads me to lesson #2-
2) Sunk Cost Fallacy.
This is actually something I've taught in a 'Bias in Decision Making' class. And what a classic example in which we were wallowing! We'd sold our Audi, spent money on the Kia, sunk about another $1,000 so far to repair it, and knew it needed more attention. The Rhode Island roads are icy this time of year and we want our kid to be safe.
It's time to put serious work into it or replace it.
How easy it would be to just keeping pouring money in to this hunk of junk because we'd already started!
We decided to replace it - after hardly six months of ownership - since we had taken on the additional need of me needing a better commuter than our family 3-row vehicle, and a small car would give me and Levi the chance to swap back and forth based on the needs of the day.
The fun thing about December decisions is that they all get put off to January action, which makes that first full work week after the New Year pretty intense.
3) Getting around to it.
We knew we needed to go car shopping and all that entails. It was glaring at us on the family white board. It was a classic "Important but not urgent (Quadrant 2)" item in Covey's time-management matrix (I taught this too). We didn't really want to do it at all.
The fun twist on 'Important but not urgent' is that, if you put these items off long enough, they become 'Important AND Urgent' at the most inconvenient times.
So I pulled out the family Google calendar and found a few 3-hour blocks, between the standard weekly work/school days and my nonstandard January weekend work schedule, and all of the evening activities, and invited Andrew and Levi to go car-shopping 3 separate times over the next 3 weeks - and off we went after school on a Monday.
4) Give a man shoes a size too big.
This one isn't original, and was neatly repackaged by a friend of mine we visited over the holidays. Give a kid a crappy, scratched up vehicle, and you're telling him that you expect him to ding up the car. Give a kid something nice to keep nice, and you're telling him the expectation is to take care of his things. You're also extending trust.
I mean, duh. The latter is how we're trying to raise our kids. Why would we do something different when the stakes are higher?
5) Financing
It doesn't feel appropriate to go in depth on this here, but we decided not to take out a loan for this vehicle because we'd taken some big leaps with our credit in 2025 and we just wanted to chill on forking over interest to the bank. I've never before swiped a debit card for a vehicle before; I think the dealership and I were equally - pleasantly - relieved when the transaction said, 'Approved.'
6) Rash decisions.
My first car-buying experience was with my dad, when I came home with a career starter loan from USAA and asked him to help me shop for a Jeep. The only ground rules we established were, "We're not buying a car today."
We found the right car and bought the car that day.
I have always set out on a vehicle purchase with this mentality but seldom do Andrew and I make it 24 hours before the deed is done. We're just... sure. (And we value efficiency of time.)
By scheduling three different times to shop, and taking our teen son along, I thought surely we were going to break ourselves of this habit of making big decisions quickly and with a lot of confidence. Maybe the two of us talk ourselves in to our own kind of group think bias.
In our defense, we had talked about it quite a bit before we started shopping, we'd written down what we were looking for in detail, and we spent at least 30 minutes in the CarMax lot cruising Civics, Corollas, Sentras, and the like until we couldn't feel our fingers.
I just have to laugh, because this is us. Maybe we'll be shopping again in another two years.
