After Almost 20 Years of Driving My Nissan Sentra....
The car in the picture isn't my actual car but it does look very close to that. Just not as new and shiny.
My car is in the shop again right now. Not too long ago we had the brakes worked on inlcuding replacing a drum of some kind. My husband is the one who deals with all that stuff. We just had the transmission fluid and filter replaced last week and I was able to drive it for just a little more than a day before we noticed that the speedometer and odometer were not working. At all. We had picked the car up last Thursday morning and took it back last Friday morning and it's been there ever since. Roy just talked to the shop owner and at this point the tab is around 900 dollars plus what was just paid for the transmission work.
We paid cash for the car when we bought it in 2002. It was already almost 5 years old by then because the new model year came out that October. We got that car and a car for my older step daughter for 9K total. This is my fourth car and I haven't ever had a car loan. Always paid cash.
In 2010 my younger step daughter was using my car because she didn't have her own yet. She went out one winter evening to run some errands and then spend some time at a friend's house. There was snow and icy weather predicted that night and her dad, my husband told her she needed to get home before it started because she had no experience driving in the bad weather. She didn't listen and at 2:30 the phone rang. That is never a good thing. It was his daughter calling to say that she had been in an accident with the car and it was undrivable. We saw it the next day at the body shop near where we lived at the time. It is a miracle that the car was ever driveable again after that. He asked her why she didn't come home like he told her to and she said that they were watching the weather but then they fell asleep. She actually called the guy whose house she was at before she called her Dad. Didn't score any points there. Of course they know everything. Luckily she wasn't really hurt of course but he was still pissed off because she didn't listen to him when he told her to get home before the snow started to fall.
We have had my car and have gotten another 11 years of driving her since that accident. Until recently it has only had to have the usual maintenance stuff done to keep it up like oil changes. So I guess we have gotten our money's worth out of it. We are NOT getting another car. First of all at this point we don't have that kind of cash on hand. Used cars are actually in short supply which means it's a seller's market if you can find any at all. Secondly and thankfully, we really don't need more than one car. Neither one of us has a job so we don't need a car to get to work. Roy is retired and I work at home doing my online marketing. Thirdly I don't want to take out a loan for another car. Right now we have a note on Roy's car because he bought it when the lease expired and the terms were favorable. He can pay it off sooner because now we aren't paying rent. But another car loan with the added expenses that go along with it, Nah! A car is not an asset. I learned that early on in life. Not unless you're like Jay Leno and can have a bunch of cars sitting around that you don't have to drive anywhere.
So now we are waiting to hear back from the mechanic to see if last Friday was may last time driving my Nissan Sentra.
Either way I am okay. It just sucks that we recently dropped a bunch of money on it thinking it would be way longer before this happened.