Cash for Clunkers!

I never thought I would say this but we bought a new car! It's weird that "change" seems to be coming to almost everything. We always have heard that you don't buy a knew car because it costs you $1000 to drive a new car off the car dealer's lot but not anymore! We went in on Thursday to look at the Hyundai's to see what a deal we could get. We found the Hyundai's Elantra would give us 10 mph more than the van so we qualified for the $4500 deal from the government. I didn't like that the government had this plan to spend our tax money to buy old cars, but since it was there, I wanted to take advantage of it to get some of our taxes we've paid back to work for us!

With the $4000 in rebates from Hyundai, we almost got the brand new car at half price. I'm not sure it was "change we can believe in" because I can hardly believe it! But we had a car that qualified as a clunker and decided to take a look at what deal we could get. We bought a 2009 Huyndai Elantra that is "Cougar" blue. We test drove it and put 3 of the 9 miles on it. It has a sunroof that the grandkids got excited about.
Our van that is now in scrap metal heaven was a 1994 Chevy Astro. We had bought it a year old in the end of 1994 and had owned it for 15 years.

Boy the memories. Eric and Ryan were at their first year at Ricks (BYU-Idaho) when we bought it. It carried us on many trips and when I taught seminary, it got me and six students into town for several years. (Of course they were hard on the seats, etc with their book bags).

Of course we got home Thursday night with the plan that we would bring the van and pick up the new car Friday morning. That night we found out that the program was already out of money!

We called Friday morning and the dealership didn't know what to tell us but by 10:30 they had gotten assurance that out deal would go through (maybe we are one of the last ones).

We actually got nostalgic when taking the van in. It served us well with the boys and family and hauling things but we're excited to be driving a new car for the first time (and probably only time) in our lives!