My husband and I are completely debt free. We don't have a mortgage (bought cheap, paid off quickly), no car payments, no CC debt. He's a programmer and I am a network engineer. He's currently employed and I'm looking for my next contract.
So here's the situation: His car is a 2000 Toyota Celica and mine is a 2012 Kia Soul. Last year the Celica had a major oil leak - after 140k miles, all the seals were starting to go, so we put 4300.00 in to have it fixed. He's had the car since 2002, paid off in 2007. So for 8 years of owning it, it wasn't a big deal to invest in the car. However, the other day his car was leaking fluid and we found out that all of his shocks will need replacing, control arm bushings, all fluids need to be drained, and something with corrosion on the AC unit, all brakes need to be replaced etc. The estimate for this is around 5,000.00 and the car has 160k miles. We have the money - the issue isn't that - it is, do we keep investing in this car? Or buy a newer used model of something with relatively low mileage.
It's not that we're not handy - we could probably do this, but we don't have the equipment to do the work ourselves so we must get it done by someone else.
We're torn. This will be now 9k towards a car that is 16 years old. My husband isn't impressed with any car out there at the moment. We love Tesla, but with the MMM plan in place we want to keep our bills low and the Model 3 is definitely out of our price range. My husband also argues that getting a nicer car will just get 'dinged up at the parking garage' for work. So I offered for him to take my Kia - but he doesn't want it to get dinged either.
Any helpful advice? What else could possibly go wrong that has yet to be replaced is the AC condenser and compressor - and I'm sure that is costly as well.
I welcome outsider opinions and thank you in advanced!