So @dragonjaze is going to look at a truck on Friday ...
Not just any truck. She's been casually looking at trucks for months. She decided what her ideal truck would be, and was working towards saving up a down payment and planning to factory order it next year. Then it just happened that this exact formula — Nissan Frontier XLT V6, manual 4x4, premium package, in the new shade of blue they introduced for 2012 — turned up within 500 miles. One of them. Possibly the only one in the whole country at the moment. They do not sell a lot of manual transmissions in this country.
She's had a dealer keeping an eye out for one and it popped up last week. Not exactly a good bargaining position, and the price has gone up since the original negotiation. I'm sure it will be higher by Friday too. I don't know how much ground she'll give. She doesn't have the cash to budge much. She scrambled to find a bank willing to lend about eleven months' pay, not just nine or so, so she could buy it before anyone else did. That really wasn't too much trouble, so she's ready to go. The truck is on a bigger truck heading this way, with her deposit already gone.
I've been looking at ads on both dealer aggregation sites and Craigslist, and see all sorts of possibilities. If she had just one need, it could be met for a fraction of the money. Something manual, something 4x4, something V6, something with a bed for hauling, something for towing … all easily found. Something old and something blue would sure be cheaper than something borrowed and something new, but at some point her criteria expanded to include specifically buying a brand new vehicle. It started when I did the same a year ago, and she's been jealous since. She's convinced that this is the only time in her life that she'll ever be able to buy something new, and she wants to do it now.
I've been over how that doesn't add up. I've pointed out that five or six years from now (not sure what her terms are) she will be wondering why she doesn't have $25,000 in cash for a down payment on some property, like she planned. She knows she has no need for a truck, particularly after discovering that $50 set of strap-on roof racks can support her woodworking hobby nicely. She won't have the money to get the cab topper she wants, and I am willing to bet she drives around with a bed full of ice half the winter. Meanwhile the doctors debate exactly how many procedures Fog needs, and all of that will sit on a credit card for months.
It's her money, so I'm giving the best support I can while being conflicted. I do support her getting exactly what she wants for $26K or $28K, whatever it is after considering interest, rather than settling on a $23K truck in dealer stock and regretting it. I just think she'd be overall happier scratching this itch with a $5K used truck or SUV and staying with her plans for putting $20K or more down on land in Washington in about five years. It's her money ... but we're trying to build that future together, so is it mine too?
