After years of looking and waiting, I finally bought the damn car! This has been such a long time coming. I kept telling myself that I should wait and that my old car was fine. I wanted to wait for a couple of things. I wanted to wait so I could save up a decent down payment so I could lower my monthly payment. I wanted to wait so I could get a 2019 at a reasonable price because that’s when Lexus starting putting in CarPlay.
I test drove a lot of different things in the last year. I test drove some things that were not Lexus and I test drove some things that were not sedans. One of the things that I drove was a Denali Acadia. That is a really nice vehicle for someone. But I’ve always drove cars and being that far off the ground was weird. So I ruled out SUVs. It’s funny because I had decided that I had wanted a Lexus without ever having driven a Lexus. And then I finally did… and wow! It was so much better than my old car and everything else I had driven. I loved it so much. And still I waited.
Then my dad bought a new truck and I got new car fever bad! I decided to get on Park Place and Sewell Lexus to see if they had any new specials or any good deals. It’s funny because I’ve told A multiple times over the past year that if I saw a really good deal, I don’t think I could pass it up. Well on Park Place’s website they were offering Certified Pre-owned 2017 Lexus ES at 0.9% for well qualified buyers. And I thought no freaking way. So I clicked on the link and scrolled through the cars that they were offering. They had one that checked every box on both my need and want list.
So I called the dealership the next day and spoke to a salesperson I had spoke to almost a year ago. I did the credit app online from work and was qualified for the low interest! It was basically a done deal at that point. A and I went to the dealership after work to test drive the car and obviously I loved it. They took my car in on trade and I said good riddance and drove home in my shiny new car!
Here are the financial details: my old car private sell value was $4000. A had talked about trying to sell it himself but I wanted nothing to do with that. Ultimately the salesperson offered us $2500 and that was good enough for me. The Lexus was listed at roughly $29.9k. Plus taxes and title came out to $33.4k. I did a laughable job at haggling and he dropped the price to $32k. So with my trade in we came in right around $31k. The salesperson talked me into getting windshield protection which was like $14 a month for 5 years. With all of that, my monthly payment works out to be $540. And it’s only costing me like $800 in interest to own so that’s pretty good.
It definitely eats up a lot of the wiggle room in my budget. The original plan for this year was to save up $10k to fix my foundation. I will definitely not be hitting that goal now. But right now I think it’s totally worth it because I love this car so much and it looks so good sitting in my driveway! 😍
Tuck City 