While the Red Sox traded with the Tribe, we traded for a Vibe!

Well, we did it.  We bought a new car!

We have been thinking about a new car purchase for quite a while now, or at least, replacing one of our cars with a newer, more reliable one.  My husband Tyler drives a 2002 Mazda Millenia that has 95k+ miles and I was driving a fancy 2001 Jaguar S-type with 120k+ miles.  Both have had maintenance problems over the past year, encouraging us to consider a replacement. Add in our need for a larger, safe and reliable vehicle in order to accommodate our growing family (not to mention the additional gear that is required by even the smallest of humans) and voila!  Time for some new wheels.

Buying a car is no easy task, especially taking into account that neither my husband nor I have ever, EVER purchased a car (new or used) from a car dealer.  Tyler has purchased used cars in the past directly from a seller, but we have never walked into a big car dealership and tried to negotiate a deal for a car. Knowing that a major car purchase was on the horizon, we actually began researching cars last year, even test driving some, reading Consumer Reports and perusing current print just to increase our general knowledge about vehicles available.  

The way my father purchases new cars serves as the Gold Standard for car buying.  Dad is, quite simply, a master at navigating a car deal - it is an amazing thing.  Over his lifetime, Dad has bought over a dozen brand new cars, most of them from American dealers. And generally  Dad believes in buying new and maintaining a car for its lifetime. Through this diligence, Dad has taken care of cars and kept them running for hundreds of thousands of miles, has incurred little associated maintenance costs, and has gained an incredible value for the cars he has driven.  But on top of this, Dad gets cars for unbelievable prices.  He has a knack - a true talent, really - for getting a bargain on a new car.  He has many amusing stories of his dealings with car salesmen, but in a nutshell, Dad wears these poor men down until they are practically giving him the car. On top of that, Dad always manages to squeeze out a "sweetener" with the deal.  And by "sweetener," I mean a steak dinner for 4 or a couple rounds of golf at a nearby golf course.  Simply, awesome.

So armed with our knowledge and advice from Dad, we decided to car shop this weekend.  We were also prompted by the government's "Cash for Clunkers" program, which provides credit to car buyers for trading in their fuel inefficient vehicles for more efficient ones.  It turns out that the Jag qualifies for the Clunkers program by getting only a combined 18 mpg, and we had decided that between our two vehicles, that was the one with which we should part.  Since the one billion dollars alloted for this program had run out of money in a mere four days, we thought to try to take advantage of the extension of this program ASAP.  

After two days of test driving, dealing, and negotiating, we settled on the 2009 Pontiac Vibe!