Cars : Keep It Til It Dies!

My motto with cars has pretty much always been “if it gets me from point A to point B, then I still love my car”. Especially if it’s paid off! And that’s what my current car is, still running and paid off for several months now. I own a 2005 Honda CRV, which is a small SUV type of vehicle that is fuel efficient because it is still a 4 cylinder vehicle and I think it’s even built on a Civic frame, it’s just that it has the body of a small SUV instead. Yes, many people have dubbed the CRV as a “chick car” but hey I could care less what it’s called, as long as it runs and it is paid off.

It’s been wonderful not having a car payment for well over six months now. I accelerated the payments on purpose for the life of the loan, just so that I could have it paid off before it hit 100 thousand miles, since I have a pretty long commute to work every day, and we tend to use my vehicle to go on long trips since mine is the more dependable vehicle between me and my husband.

But we don’t mind. We’re not people who have to have the latest fancy cars, we’re pretty practical, and if you read any of the “get rich” books, then you know that the people who accumulate true wealth are the ones that do things like keep cars that are paid off for several years instead of trading up to the latest and greatest models whenever they get tired of their car or it goes out of fashion.

If you read books or study how truly wealthy people behave, they really don’t blow their money on things like new cars and vacations all the time, but rather, they save as much of their money as they can, and they live off a small percentage of their income, stashing away the rest in investments and savings that yield returns. A lot of people are learning that with this recession, wealth is very easily lost, and they are paying dearly for lifestyles that have been largely funded by accumulating debt and easy credit rather than accumulating wealth.

In other words, they were paying everyone else before they paid themselves, as the author of Rich Dad Poor Dad says, or something like that. It’s truly sage advice, and keeping your car til it doesn’t run any more is one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever taken.