It’s done. I sold my 2006 Toyota Tacoma and am now driving a 2000 Toyota Tacoma. While it was a bit stressful to do, I don’t regret it one bit. The 2000 has only 55,000 miles on it and should last for quite some time. I ended up getting about what I wanted for the 2006. The check has cleared and the money is in our account. We’ll be using a bit of the funds to get the sheet rock in the lake house completed. Once that is done, we’ll do some painting and then we will be doing all the finishing work. At this rate, I hope to have occupancy by early spring.
It’s nice to look at our net worth charts and see that cars are a very tiny portion of our overall net worth. The less depreciating assets on the books, the better. As the lake house is completed, I’m also looking forward to funding my 401K more aggressively. In the past I was contributing up to the IRS annual maximum but have had to pull back from that a bit to use the funds on the lake house. Currently we are only contributing 8% of my income, along with the company match of 6%. Contributing 14% to your 401K is pretty decent but it puts us just shy of the IRS maximum so we’ll be trying to increase that soon. I fully intend to roll all of next year’s raise in to the 401K each month. That should easily put us over the mark.
I’d like to say I’ve learned my lesson on buying new cars. I’ve had a couple episodes where I bought brand new cars, only to sell them less than 2 years later for a loss. How does that saying go, “Fool me once………”. Yeah, I don’t learn very easily when it comes to cars. I think I need to recognize a couple things about myself. First, I’m rather indecisive and can easily change my mind on something. Second, I love cars and always will. With this in mind, my new goal will be only to buy a car that I know I can sell later and break even on or make a bit of money on it. Not easy to do, but also not impossible.
The hope, for now, is that we have two reliable cars that will go many more miles. We have a Toyota Tacoma, like I mentioned above, and also a 2000 Honda Accord. Both of these cars have strong resale values (a sign of quality) and also are known to be quite reliable. We’ll be banking on that for the next few years.