When you need to get another car,

[hunter]

43. Car payments were a serious hardship.

Soon after I bought my first and last new car my wife was accepted to her dream graduate school, out of state.

The jump from both of us having good paying jobs to her being a student and me getting a job there that payed much less, was brutal.

We couldn't give up my car, but we couldn't pay for it either.

Then the medical problems that have been dogging my wife and I ever since first bit. I'm over 50 now and have never enjoyed a stable financial situation. I don't expect I ever will, not until we have a single payer national health care plan, or I qualify for medicare.

We still drive the car my wife had when we were married, vintage 1984... Our second car is just as old, with a salvage title. The "family" car (our kids are in college and drive too...) is a 1998 model.

I'm good enough as a shade-tree mechanic that I'd never consider a new car. That part of "The American Dream" passed me by, and I now reject it.

I hate cars, all cars, and the cars we own know it and punish me by bloodying my knuckles and lasting forever.