Our New Set of Wheels!

We're now the proud owners of a family-sized car!  I will miss my cute, sporty little Civic (which is now "Brian's  car") but I'm LOVING our new one so far!

(this is from my cell phone and really doesn't do it justice, but you get the idea)

Since our family will be expanding soon, and our family car has been my itsy-bitsy 2002 Civic, we've been car shopping for the past few weeks for a car that would fit a 4-person family comfortably.  I'll be honest, its been kind of stressful because our budget wasn't very big and most of the cars we'd been finding in our price range were either too small or weren't what we'd call "quality cars", and we'd been looking all over the place for weeks- KSL.com, Craigslist, different dealerships.  It was pretty discouraging.  

Then on Monday, Brian saw a little Kia SUV at a small dealership here in Cedar City.  Its was priced at $6,000 (the lower end of our car budget), but looked brand new, so he asked me to call and see why it was priced so low.  So I did, and the woman on the phone told me that it didn't have any airconditioning- definitely NOT the car for us!  But she was so nice on the phone, I told Brian we should go there after work and see what other cars they had.  

So Monday night around 7:30 (we had dinner first) we headed over there just expecting to browse a little since we thought they'd be closed. Well, the owner, who is an older gentleman came out and asked if we'd like to see any cars.  Luckily, I had our infant car seat with me since I'd been trying it out at other dealerships in other cars to see how much room it would leave (in our Civic, you have to push the front seat ALL the way forward to fit it), so we tried it out in a few small SUV's they had and it didn't leave me much leg room in any of them :(  I was so discouraged!  Then the owner said, "why don't you come look at this car" and took us over to a big ol' beast, a 2007 Ford 500.  It was like a cave inside!  The infant seat fits in the back with the front seat pushed almost all the way back, which leaves me a TON of leg room!  So we took it for a test drive, and it was sooooooooo smooth and comfy, and the engine sounded great!  I hadn't even heard of a Ford 500 though, so I told Brian we ought to go home and do some research on it before deciding to buy it.  So that night, we looked up a bunch of reviews, the safety ratings, carfaxed the vin, etc. and decided it was the car for us!  

The owner and his wife are the only people that work at the dealership, and he was gone Tuesday to an auto auction in Salt Lake, so asked us to come first thing Wednesday morning.  We went in yesterday, and there was some paperwork we had to run over to our credit union since we were doing our own financing in order to get the loan.  While we were with our loan officer, he priced the value of the car, and was amazed that we were getting it for $3,500 less than they valued it :)  Yay!  He asked where we were buying it from, and we told him Cedar City Truck Sales, and he said "oh yeah, we do alot of auto loans for them".  So I asked (just in case) if he'd ever heard anything bad about them or their cars (since our price was so good) and he said he'd never heard a bad thing about them, and that in general their prices were always really good.  So that was great to know too :)  

After the bank, we went back to the dealership, finalized everything and came away with a car that was MUCH better than we'd thought we'd get in our price range, which will fit all of us without me having to ride with my knees up to my chin, and which doesn't look too bad either :)  So I'm pretty excited!  

Here are some pictures, not of my car, but of the same model and year.  Like I said before, my Civic was probably alot "cooler" and definitely alot sportier, but this will be great for us I think!