Updated Budget

Over the last couple of blog posts I shared with you our recent new car purchase and some of the expected fuel savings that we're looking forward to.  This post is all about how much it's going to cost us to save that gas and how the budget is going to change.

The total price we are financing, including fees and taxes, is $21.013.91.

Not too shabby for wanting to be under $20K.  Here's the breakdown:

We start at just under $20K with a $1K discount because we're good negotiators (at least we think we are) - next up are some pretty standard add on and fees.  I wasn't sure about the protective paint coating but Jordan works in the industry and was confident that it was a good price for a good product.

We are financing at 0%.

The 0% financing deal accompanied terms up to 60 months as well as their 60/84 plan.  I hadn't heard of the latter before but basically is their way to trap people into owing a balance at the end of the plan with an option to re-finance (most people just roll the amount owing and trade in for a new vehicle apparently.

Well, we're not that silly but we like flexibility of lower payments and we like 0% financing.

So, we went with it.  Our payments will default to $115.65/bi-weekly for 60 months with $5,979.41 owing at the end of the term.  We intend on comming up with the extra $1,000 each year to add to the loan (it's open with no penalties for early payments) to make sure it's paid off sooner rather then later.

So!  We have increased payments of $115.65/bi-weekly - now what? Well, we're also saving about $110/month on fuel and will have increased insurance premiums of about $31.48/month (it's about because our insurance is currently under renewal).

We were planning on increasing our day-to-day spending from $375 to $400 in January, instead we have reduced it to $300/month.  That leaves us with an unplanned overage of $77.78 (($115.65*2)+31.48-75-110).  We'll have a little bit less cash going towards the backyard debt, but it's not significant enough to worry about - you'll see more changes coming to our budget in the months ahead, but this will get us to the end of the year.