I am trying to decide whether to sell my car to buy an older, less expensive car. I don't see a lot of downside to doing this and see a lot of upside. DH sees mostly downside and hardly any upside.
Our personal situation - DH Is retired, I am semi-retired and probably will fully retire soon. We are FI and our financial survival doesn't depend on any of this. That is, we should be fine no matter the decision but I tend to think selling the car is more optimal. We live in a semi-rural area where we are 20 minutes drive away from any shopping. There is no public transportation of any type. I never want to be without two vehicles. We typically buy new, but keep our cars for a very long time.
I have a 2012 Ford Explorer that we could sell for $30k to $32k. Right now I drive it to work twice a week, 120 mile round trip. I really enjoy driving it and like the safety features (adaptive cruise, collision warning, blind spot indicator).
The reason we have an SUV is that we have very large dogs and need a vehicle where we can put in a couple of full size dog crates. We fairly often carry 5 people in it and use it when we buy things that can't fit in our other vehicle.
DH's vehicle is a 2013 Hyundai Veloster. It will seat 4 and gets much better gas mileage than the Explorer. Since buying it, we never use the Explorer except when I go to work or when we specifically need to do something that we can't do with the Veloster or both DH and I need to go somewhere separately. Many weeks we actually never use the Explorer except when I go to work.
Basically except when I work we don't often need the Explorer but when we need it we really need it and the Veloster wouldn't work.
While I enjoy driving the Explorer while I am spending 3 hours in it on days that I work, I think it is way overkill when we will later be driving it 3000 to 6000 miles a year.
So I want to sell it, buy an older, less expensive vehicle that we can haul dogs in and seat at least 5 people.
DH is opposed to it because he feels that we know the condition of the Explorer, we can afford to keep it and if we buy an older used car we have higher maintenance costs and you never know if a used car will be reliable. I basically agree with all of his points but think we can net enough money doing this to make it worthwhile anyway.
Sell Explorer? Keep Explorer?
Anyone?