Am I stupid?!?!?
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Am I stupid?!?!?
| Fri, 04-30-2010 - 10:46am |
So here I am ranting and raving about us doing all this needless spending and needing to get credit cards paid off and DH and I go and sign a lease last night!!

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According to Clark Howard, on CNN network, lease are a bad idea.
Norma
"Patience is the best remedy for every trouble"- Plautus
Maybe it's time for the two of you to examine your life to determine whether you want to continue to keep up the pretense of affluence or actually to be affluent.
Not too long ago someone on the board asked what our biggest financial mistakes were.
I don't think you are stupid. I think you are smart but get talked into things. I used to as well. The trick here is to bring DH around to your way of financial wisdom thinking. Good luck. This will be the hardest thing on your journey.
My in-laws lease. My MIL called me excited b/c they'd leased two cheaper cars versus hundreds a month in leases for the luxury cards they had prior. I said that was great, but asked her why they leased when they'd never get rid of payments and she said they didn't have to worry about maintenance and that FIL gets tired of looking at the same car for too long.
Did I mention they did this after a year-long layoff in which they nearly lost their house and had to live on credit cards?
I responded by saying a few hundred bucks a month was a high tax on not wanting to look at the same car for too long! Not to mention the "free oil changes and free state inspections" aren't much of a coup when you're spending hundreds a month for the privilege of driving the vehicle.
By comparison, my minivan (which we did buy new, but I wouldn't buy new again) has 105k miles on it and has yet to need a repair. Which is a good thing b/c although I'm sleeping w/ my mechanic (running joke among the wives of mechanics - DH does the work) my car is the last thing he fixes! We stopped paying for it in 2005 and five years later, that's a LOT of months we didn't have a car payment from a lease, buying out a lease, or buying a new car b/c we were tired of looking at the one we had. We easily spend less than $200 a YEAR on maintenance.
MIL couldn't argue with me, but FIL would have.
FLINGING DEBT:
I'll ditto that statement!
Norma
"Patience is the best remedy for every trouble"- Plautus
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