That is what $300 a month? Let’s see, $3,500 divided by $300 is 12 months before that remaining balance would be paid off. For me that is not fast enough, I want it gone by the end of summer. This gives me about 5 months to get it done, $700 a month. At this point I am not really sure how I am going to increase my income by $400 a month. Right now I only work one night a week at the pizza shop and I am willing to pick up more shifts, but there are none available. Which means I need to either pick up a third job for the evenings, work overtime, or beg for more time at the pizza shop. Yikes so much work.

Every day goes by and I think to myself, I really need to post on what is going on and then of course life happens. I have time right now and let me start with the big one. The never ending saga of selling our SUV. Where did I leave off? I got the title, let the guy know, and I thought we would do the exchange this past weekend. It turned out that he would be leaving for training on Saturday morning for his work and would be back on Monday night. Today is Thursday, correct? I haven’t heard from him. I called on Monday and left a message on his phone that immediately went to voicemail, no biggie I thought, he probably has it off. We have had great communication thus far and he will give me a call back….won’t he? Tuesday rolls on by and I tried a follow up call that evening, but again straight to voicemail. I didn’t leave a message this time. Wednesday, again I wait. I call in the afternoon and straight to voicemail so I fired off an email to him with no response.

Maybe he is out on training and forgot his charger and the phone went dead or even forgot his phone and then it went dead? Training went long? Walking back from his training? Taken hostage? There could be any number of valid reasons and at this point with how long this deal has gone on it needs to end.

I guess at this point I am beginning to panic that I am about to lose this sale. I cannot fathom as to why I would, the guy gave me $500 of his money to hold the vehicle and to take care of a few things with that money, namely the cracked windshield. He is invested in the purchase of the SUV so I am not really sure why he would just let $500 be tied up in a complete stranger. It’s $500, that is a lot of money. I can think of one thing and one thing only to do with that money, pay down debt. Let me tell you it is burning a hole in my pocket to do so. Ugh….

I will be driving to his place to sign the papers, remove my plates, and scrape off the registration and inspection stickers so he can have it. Aside from the money will receive from the sale by selling the vehicle we will also free up valuable space in our driveway. It is tedious to have to move three vehicles everyday so that the kids can enjoy riding their bicycles and coloring with chalk in the driveway. Not only that, but our insurance will drop about $300 a year and I won’t have to register it again this fall. Our state goes by the weight of vehicle to determine the fee of the registration. That thing was heavy. I think it weighed close to two tons, about 3,700 lbs. That is a lot of weight to shed and and great symbolism of a plasectomy.

I did all the right things; detailed the car, researched the value, posted ads, haggled and struck a deal. The windshield has been fixed and I was going to go to his place on Tuesday evening, accept the cash, sign the bill of sale and title over to him and say good bye. It was going to be like a dream come true. I left work on Tuesday with papers in hand with the exception of the title which is locked safely away in our safe under our bed. This should be easy I thought I will run upstairs grab the title and go, no big deal. When I arrive at home, my wife is ready to with her keys in hand as she will follow me to drop the SUV off and bring us back home. Let me just go and grab the title I say. I rush upstairs, slide out the safe from under our bed, unlock and rummage through all the important documents…”uh, honey, where is the title?” Now, we paid this vehicle off back in 2007 and at the time the title was held by Suntrust bank and after paying back the loan the title is mailed to you, yours to keep, yay! Given it has been two years it was a resounding “nope” that I entirely expected to hear. I checked a few places where I thought it might be with no luck. I gave the buyer a call, explained the situation of my idiocy and thankfully he was very understanding. I spent all of Tuesday and Wednesday night looking through every single nook and cranny of our home for this title. My wife found the congratulatory letter of paying off the loan in 2007, the letter saying we can register the vehicle in another state in 2005 when we moved, and all the service records ever completed on the vehicle, but no title.

Why, dear god, why? I made several phone calls to the state we live in, the state we used to live in, and Suntrust bank. Our state has no record of titling the vehicle here after we received the title from the bank. I am pretty sure we did this, but I have no proof. The state we used to live was rude to my request of simply asking if it still had a record of it being titled in that state and they said yes. Suntrust was above and beyond assisting me in getting a duplicate title. The title officer that I spoke with verified they no longer have it and then proceeded to call the state and order a second copy to be sent to him so that he may sign the lien release again and forward it to me once finished. That man is the man. In two weeks or so I should have the title in hand again and be able to get rid of this thing.

Of course I called the buyer and explained the entire situation yesterday and he was totally cool with it. Oddly, he isn’t in any rush and I couldn’t have asked for a more understandable buyer. The guy has a few hundred dollars of his money in my possession as a deposit to hold the vehicle. If it were me, I would have asked for my money back and moved on. Fingers crossed he stays interested the entire time. I really could use the money for the plasectomy right now.

Let me just say, I hate trying to sell a vehicle via the private party process. I do not enjoy the whole listing, waiting, calling, waiting, test driving, and waiting some more dance routine. It does have a great payoff in the end though, money. Back when we were purchasing the new to us minivan the dealerships that we visited offered us between $700 and $1,300 for it and to this day I am flabbergasted by that offer. I know they are in business to make money, but come on, I papers with the trade in values in hand showing that the value was significantly more. I suppose that this will be one of those life lessons to never trade in a vehicle again and to actually spend the time trying to sell it on my own. Heck, even if I accepted a low ball offer of $2,000 on the SUV, which I was offered constantly, I would be making out far greater than any dealer would offer.

The SUV that we have being trying to sell for the past couple months finally has a potential buyer. He came on Saturday to take a look at, test drive, and haggle me with pricing. I originally starting asking $4,200 for it at the beginning of February with little to no interest. Over the past weeks I slowly dropped the price down to $3,500 which brought the attention of a few buyers and thankfully one of them has committed to purchase the vehicle. The windshield has a crack in it from a tree branch falling out of the tree in the driveway from a severe storm and after haggling we settled on $3,200 for the vehicle with the windshield fixed. He gave me a $500 deposit to hold the explorer and repair the windshield. This works for me as I was selling it with a damaged windshield that I fully disclosed in the ad. The windshield will be replaced tomorrow morning within a couple of hours and it should be good to go. Hopefully by the end of this week it will be gone.

As much as my emotions and intensity to rid our family of the credit card debt and sell everything we own, I am glad I was patient with this sale. This sale, once papers are signed and it drives away, will take a serious bite out of my plasectomy. Fingers crossed!

We have a 2001 Ford Explorer that since been replaced by our minivan. Looking back I often wonder if maybe we should have forgone that purchase and dealt with 3 kids lined up in the backseat and save $247 a month on a car payment. The reality of it is that we were silly in purchasing the van. However, I have said it before at least I think I have and if I haven’t, I love the minivan. There I said it, as a man, I love the minivan.

The Explorer has 109,500 miles on it and some recent maintenance work and from what I am the engine would last forever and all it does is sit there in our driveway day after day. Our home is small at 702 square feet, but somehow our drive is long enough to accommodate three vehicles. This is nice, except for when you need to play musical cars and then in becomes a major pain in the butt. I have listed the Explorer several times on Craigslist over the past couple of weeks with little interest beyond the scammers who would like to purchase it for their brother/sister/mother/father/dog/cat…you get the idea. I really would like to get as much I can for it and the value according to Edmunds and Kelley Blue Book ranges from $4,000-$4,900. I had it listed for $4,200. I don’t want to be greedy and I don’t want to sell myself short. I look at this as another great opportunity to help out the plasectomy and raise us out of a little more debt.

I have thought about getting an ad up on Autotrader and the cost would be $39 until it is sold. I think that this is a fair deal to get it sold and it would expand my visibility tremendously.

Anyone have any tips on getting this sold quick without selling myself short?

When we were car shopping I went with a purpose, a car payment no more than $210 a month. This amount was something we could manage at the time, after all this is America gosh darn it and this is how we do things, with a payment plan. We browsed, we drove, we conquered, and the journey was finally over. After several dealerships, dragging three children, numerous test drives, drooling over the dual climate control, outside temperature display, power doors, mirror, and what other extras I am forgetting, we came to our senses and realized no matter what way we finagled it we couldn’t get the price down. Thankfully we did have the sense to go with the lesser options and more “affordable” payment. Ha! I had brought an auto loan calculator with me and I was able to determine what our payment would be based off the number of months, interest rate, and purchase price of the van. The payment came to around $203 a month, just under my maximum payment, oh yeah!

However, we did something stupid, not only did we drive off the lot with a van we couldn’t really afford, we purchased that dreaded extended third party warranty. The car salesman really drove home the *ahem* value and *cough* safety card to my wife by pressing on the mommy button. I was dead set against it, my wife was for it, and he played the trump card. His tall tale went like this; imagine you and your kids being stranded in some far away land with no one to help in sight. This magic warranty will save you in your time of need, ugh, he won. Truth be told she and I discussed this in great lengths while were there and the whole process was dragging. It was getting late and they had closed 20 minutes before by the time we were signing those papers. I caved, I wanted out and to go home. Foolish of me in two ways, we have a car payment now and the warranty that drove up that car payment to $247 a month.