Hubby and I discovered MMM last summer, and quickly decided to make some changes to our "fleet" of cars. He was driving a 2002 Saturn with ~220,000 miles on it, I was driving a nearly new Toyota Sienna with a $13,000 loan, and our 18 year old was driving a 1997 Lumina that broke down all the time and drank huge amounts of fuel (all of which he paid for himself). We considered trading the Sienna for a compact car of the same approximate age/mileage, just for the fuel savings and reduced insurance, but after much back-and-forth in our thinking, we decided that his Saturn had been such an amazingly reliable little car, we'd go ahead and scale way back and get more of those. He kept his car (it now has 262,000 miles on it and is still humming along), we sold the van for a couple thousand more than we owed, and then bought another 2002 Saturn, a smaller 2000 one as a backup for DH since his is up there in miles, and our son traded his Lumina for a 1999 Saturn SL2.
We put maybe $2,000 into the cars over the remainder of 2013, just working out a few minor bugs to get them really operating well, and also to put brand new tires on both of them. By the end of the year, we thought we were ready to start reaping the $$ benefits of our Mustachian changes.
And then the day after Christmas, all hell broke loose. Our son blew the engine in his car, and he and hubby spent about three months replacing the engine themselves. They made some rookie mistakes that caused the transmission to fail, and we ended up going to three different mechanics who diagnosed it with different problems and making expensive repairs. Then we started to have problems with the little backup car, and then hubby's car, and then my car. We had weeks where out of our four cars, only one was working. And then to add insult to injury, my car was destroyed by an uninsured motorist in March of this year. We replaced it with another one just like it, and it has started to cause problems, too...the mysterious kind that every mechanic diagnoses as something different, but that their repairs don't fix. We've done a lot of the recommended repairs ourselves (yes, I play grease monkey, too) to save money, but it's still been really expensive and REALLY, REALLY frustrating. We are still trying to figure out what is causing it to shudder when it accelerates.
We have spent more than $5,000 on car repairs in 2014 alone, and all the problems aren't gone! That doesn't count more than $2,000 that our son also put into his car.
I am starting to think we screwed up. Hubby had two hours to kill today between two medical appointments, and he spent it at a Hyundai dealership looking at Elantras (which is what I wanted last summer before we decided on these cars). He admitted that he was tempted by their 0% interest offer. The frustration is getting to us. If we had a reason to think we would finally have these issues figured out soon and we'd start to save big bucks by not making payments, I know we'd both stay on course. But I could have made 14 payments on my Sienna with the money we've spent on repairs in just the last six months. It's hard to look at that and think staying the course is making sense...
