Financial discipline

Sophia and I are in the market for a new car right now and we’ll likely make a purchase this week. The past few years we’ve been driving my sister’s high school car, a 2010 VW Jetta as a beater through San Francisco. It’s been great not really caring about it and street parking it without issues. But my Dad now needs a car and we figured we give him this one and finally buy a car.

Especially given that we haven’t had a car payment for the last 3 years, we’re sitting a pretty good financial position to buy a good car. We’ve been a bit all over the place going from a reliable Toyota to a luxury Audi.

One thing that I’m happy about is that we’ve been doing a good job staying financially disciplined. Yes, we can probably afford to spend a bit more on a nicer car, but Sophia and I have been doing our best to battle the life style creep. I was close to pulling the trigger last week, but Sophia reminded me of the life style creep and I’m proud of her for that.

Going into the next few days, we’ve got a great plan in place in that if we get a great lease deal on a nicer car, we’ll gladly take that and return it after 3 years when we have a clearer picture of our personal needs and the EV market. It needs to be a great deal of course and we have our budgets set to drive a hard baragain.

If we’re not able to get there, we’ll just buy a reliable and great car that holds their value well so we can look to resell or upgrade in a few years down the road.