Well, turns out we owed over $400 in taxes for that 1099 my husband received. Self employment tax sure does add up! This is just taxes on a little over $1400. We already paid the rest when we originally did our taxes earlier this year. I was not happy to write a check to the IRS for over $400 this week. Boy was I not happy paying that at all. Especially with all the bailout crap going on. $400 is not a lot of money to some people. Heck, that $400 might just pay a hotel night for some Wall Street exec but for us that $400 is a lot of money. What are ya gonna do? I had to pay it, I don’t need IRS troubles.
Moving on from the sour tax subject to something else that happened to us this week-we got another car…YAY. For these past few months, we have been struggling with the 1 car but now it seems we have cars coming out of our ears…lol! We are still waiting on word on whether or not we will be able to keep the 2000 Toyota. In the meantime, a friend of ours asked my husband to sell a car he fixed up and he would give him a percentage if it sold. The car is a 1991 Honda Accord, decent mileage for it’s year and he gave it a total tune up and replaced the timing belt on it. He said the car runs strong and someone could get a few years out of it. He did not know we needed another car so my husband inquired about it.
He sold it to us for $1000 and told us that if anything goes wrong with it-he will fix it for free. He is a mechanic so that is awesome. He told my husband to pay him $500 now and $500 later on. That is a pretty good deal. I drove the car for the first time this morning. It runs great and the body is in excellent condition. The paint, oh it is not so pretty. It is faded but given the age of the car, I can’t complain. So it is not the most pretty car in the world but it gets me from point A to point B and I am happy with that. Besides, I wont be making a car payment on it so I am really happy about that!
It is kind of funny-we brought the car home and parked it and naturally a new Honda parked right next to us. My daughter came out to look at our “new car” and when she saw the new Honda-she got all excited. I said “no honey, it is that one over there.” I could see her face was a little stunned. We have always had old cars-worse off cars but she was too young to remember them. These past few years we have had all new cars. So of course, I gave her the talk on car payments and finances and how we are saving money with this car. She understood it completely.
Now I know once I bring that car to work I will get some sort of rude comments and I am sure I will get some stares on the road but I just don’t care. While most people are struggling to make their car payments and avoid the repo man in these times, I am OK with riding around in a not-so-pretty but runs perfect and is totally paid off car. I was one of those people who was buried in 2 car payments and for what? It is NOT a good feeling to have-not for a car anyway. At least not for me.
The nice thing too is the insurance for the car is like $40 a month. So all together, it cost $1000 for the car. About $180 to register the car and get the tag and title. Not too bad.
So if the 2000 Toyota comes through, what are we going to do? We are definitely going to take it. The car is worth over $6K and it will cost less than $250 to take ownership of it if all goes through. I am just not sure exactly what car we would keep. We can’t afford 3 and we don’t need 3. The ideal thing to do would be to surrender the Civic in the bankruptcy since we still have the option to. We have not received the reaffirmation agreement yet from Honda. That would make us totally car payment free. That would be awesome.
There is still that chance we will not get the Toyota and that is one of the reasons we jumped on this car. But, if we did get it, it would be great. Time will tell with these things.
