My Car Goes Vroom

I am sooo excited to be writing this post. I don't think I ever mentioned it but for the last 7 months my husband and I have been a one car family. Long story short- my brother needed a car, we were thinking of selling our fun, little Mazda stick shift so in the end we sold him the car. Since Tim travels a lot for work and we are lucky enough to be walking distance from a train stop to the airport, it wasn't really a problem for a little while. 

This isn't actually a pic of our old car specifically, this is from the website. I felt compelled to stress that in case you couldn't tell from the awesome photo editing and the souped up ride :).

However, 6 months in we hit Christmas time and realize that we both needed cars more and more. Tim wasn't traveling that much and needed to stop in at the office. I still had to take the car everyday to work (its about a 30-40 min. commute). So we searched for a used small SUV style car since we love our current Toyota Rav 4 so much. The hubby suggested a Hyundai Santa Fe. He has gotten it a lot as his rental car and he likes how it drives and the storage they provide in the back. So we searched...and test drove...and haggeled....and searched more but we still were not having any luck finding a well priced used car. So last week we got our answer when a Hyundai dealership about 50 minutes away was having a serious sale on new cars. In fact, the prices were competing with the used cars we were looking at. After a little Q & A with the lady at the dealership, we decided to check it out. So we headed down there this weekend and found this beauty.

Isn't it awesome? Neither Tim nor I have ever owned a brand new car and I'm not sure if we ever will again but right now we are really happy that we waited until we were sure we got what we wanted (and saved a nice chunk to put down). I know what you're thinking...what does James have to say about all this? Well he doesn't seem to mind all the room in the back.

*update: not even 24 hours of having the car and James scratched the drivers side door already! Silly pup got excited when we came back from a quick drive with Tim's mom and JUMPED on our car door. You could say, we were not excited. Lucky for him, we love him to death and some turtle wax helped buff it out.*

If and probably when I have to go car shopping again, I really want to remember some of these helpful tips for next time. Some of these we did  (go us!) and some of them we WISHED we did: (see if you can guess what we did/didn't do.)

- Make sure you check with the dealership about what form of payment they take. (check, cashiers check, credit card etc.)

- Try not to go on a Saturday. You aren't the only one thinking of buying a car that day and the line and wait will be ridiculous and a waste of time.

- Don't always believe all the ads. Read all of the fine print and call and ask more information about it before going.

- If you are looking at used cars, always turn the radio off at test drives and listen to the engine. Any little noise you hear could be something much bigger. (exp. We heard a little noise on a used one, had it checked out by a mechanic before buying and it turned out to be a $1,500 oil leak)

- Check with your insurance company before looking at cars to see what you  will need to do to add a car you bought to your insurance right away.

So instead of any fun recipes or home projects, this was our big game changer this weekend. Any one else buy a car recently? Anymore tips to add? I am proud to say we did most of these things but after a little trial and error. :)