Originally posted on Money with Merne’s Facebook Page on May 31, 2017:
Financial Follower Friends! I’m so excited to post about our family’s new addition! I’m not really a car fanatic or anything, I see cars as necessary modes of transportation and the whole buying process is pretty stressful. My excitement is because this is the first car we’ve bought outright! No loan! I was planning to get a loan whenever we had to replace our 13 year old car, but when I realized I had money not only in my husband’s car fund, but my car fund and our emergency fund, it didn’t make sense to me to pay someone interest. We will deplete less than a quarter of the emergency fund and it will be paid back very quickly I promise! As I’ve mentioned in the past, since we have many buckets of savings and our large emergency fund sits there stagnant making 1% interest, I like to give ourselves loans when these situations arise so we can avoid paying interest on bank loans. This is a huge accomplishment for us and I hope you can buy a car with cash one day too!! (Of course we used our credit card to the max they would allow so we could get points and then we will pay off the balance this month. For the rest, we wrote a very large Disney princess check lol!) We also buy from a reputable chain of used car dealers that specialize in newer model cars coming off leases. So we got a three year old car that is very new to us and $10k cheaper than buying new!