Well we filed our taxes about two weeks ago. I had been planning to use Studio Tax, a free tax program to do our taxes, but a friend offered to do them and efile them for us. We took him up on his generous offer and today we got our cheques in the mail. Two nice fat, refund cheques.
Good thing too. Yesterday, Sunday while out grocery shopping, something in the drive train of the Chevy Venture failed. Big time. In the grocery parking lot, it failed with a horrible snap and grinding noise. While in gear the van would no longer move and while in park it would still move.
CAA towed it up to my mechanic who was open and working on a Sunday. Actually, it's a father and son operation and the father is in Florida. Since there's only one guy in the shop, of course it has got completely crazy busy. He hasn't had a chance to look at it but did say that if it was the transmission, a used replacement would be $2,200 to $2,800. I'm not willing to put that kind of money into a 1997 vehicle. If the repairs are going to be $1,000, we'll get it fixed, otherwise we will have to find a new vehicle. Well, a used vehicle. Maybe an older, used vehicle.
This would of been easier in a year or two, but we're in a way better spot than we would of been six months ago.
A number of friends of ours have Ford Focus Wagons and they all seem pretty happy with them. My quick check online tonight seems to indicate that 3 -4 year old models run $10,000 to $14,000. More than we can afford right now. We still have $23,000 in debt and I don't want to put that up more.
Up here in Canada, car prices seem higher than in the states for cars. The $3,000 - $4,000 that we can put towards the car will not buy too much. I'll be putting feelers out to all the people I know to see if anyone has a decent cheap car for sale.
Ah well. Time to sleep on this. Good night.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Taxes and Cars
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2 comments:
Oh no! Good luck with this, I hope the repairs aren't too high. I just put $514 on my car (and new tires in December, another $400) so I hope it'll last me a long time still!!
What did you guys do to get such big refunds?
Hi! Thanks for the comments!
We've both been having extra money pulled out with the tax withholding each paycheque.
It's not the best savings method, but it worked for us. Now that we've got our act together we've stopped the extra withholding.
Mrs. B. also gets the credit for her transit pass that helps out to the tune of a couple of hundred dollars on the return.
The money for the car is also from our emergency savings. The returns weren't that good! :-)
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