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Buying a New Car

Thankfully, I have been debt free except for mortgage for over a year, and without a personal car payment on my own car for more than two years. My car is approaching 200,000 miles and knowing deciding what kind of car to buy has consumed a lot of time for me and I find myself wondering what the best kind of car is to get when the time comes.

Budgeting the money for a new car is a major motivation for this. And in order to know how much to budget, I have to consider what kind of car I will purchase which is the subject of this post. In terms of changes since I last bought a car, I now have a pug. As a result, there is more fur than you can shake a stick at and I am considering a car with a hatchback/cargo area for the dog where he could be safe and comfortable as opposed to being stuck with having a bulky crate in the back seat.

Other than that, I know that I want to maintain with either a small or mid-size car, but nothing larger (although truth-be-told, I'd love to have one) but I just refuse to spend the additional cash on it at this point. My results for consideration also have gas mileage in mind since I have about 20 miles of commuting each way.

For consideration, I am looking at:
Toyota Matrix
Honda Fit
Nissan Rogue
Toyota Prius
Toyota Corolla

The difficulty with such a range is that the price points for the more expensive cars like the prius can be anywhere from 8-10K more than the less expensive cars in my list. One thing is almost certain for me though--I will almost certainly buy new. As someone who has seen that people have a used cars (and had been driven around in used cars growing up), I never cared for the feeling that transportation is questionable. For my purposes, I want it to be reliable without worry. Finance Fox buys only new used cars, but I have found that the idea of having a new car that is reliable, that I hold for the full payment term, payoff early, and then drive for an additional 2+ years can also work out quite well.



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