Sunday, January 21, 2007

My ignorance is costing me...$360/month (and sometimes more)

As I may have mentioned, Fiance and I work together. Naturally, we drive in together. He has a lovely car that he likes driving. (And it's only about 7 or 8 miles to our office from where we live, so it's a brisk 15 minute drive.)

Buuuut....his car has a standard transmission. Yup, you guessed it--I don't know how to drive stick. There's not much that can be done about teaching me right now; the slush and snow makes the road conditions pretty bad, and I don't drive much in the winter as it is. But when the weather gets nice, look out!

Actually, yes, look out.

(Kidding--I'm not that terrible of a driver.)

Anyway, the other issue is the convenience of having two cars available. There've been a few times when we split up errands, or had two places to be on the same night, but I think I can count on one hand the times when the scheduling problem couldn't have been solved by a little bit of forward planning.

There's two pieces of good news (as in, it's not costing as much as it could be):
1) The car was bought on a 0% loan, and I can adjust the payment amount as necessary (as the lender is my mother), and
2) Insurance is several hundred dollars cheaper because it's for pleasure instead of commuting, and because it's driven less than 2000 miles per year.

And that begs the question: If I drive it less than 2K miles each year...why am I keeping it?

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