Financing College by Selling the Van

First it was Netflix, now it’s the van.

I’ve been putting off writing this post for about a month.  It has been about that long since we’ve decided that selling our van would be in our best interest (financially speaking).

I first brought this idea up way back in July, but my wife wasn’t on board quite yet. Then we both read Dave Ramsey’s, “The Total Money Makeover” and we realized that we probably made a mistake when we bought our van in the first place.

If finances weren’t an issue we’d never sell this van.  We love it!  It’s just that with me going back to school and only working part time, we sure could use an extra $330 a month.

We didn’t sell our van right away because we had 3 long out of town trips in the works and my wife had 5 weddings to shoot this month.  So we decided to wait until after Columbus Day weekend to get the ball rolling.  And almost as soon as we picked that date, we started to question our decision.

Do we really have to sell the van?

If we truly want to get rid of debt, then the answer is simple…YES!

I took out a student loan ($7750) for this school year.  Hopefully this will be all I have to borrow, but it will still be adding to our debt.  Our theory is even if I have to borrow a little more, we’ll still have less debt when I get out of school then when I went in.

If you remember back to one of my first posts I laid out our debt situation.  There I showed that we owed $11,000+ on our van.  I hope to be able to get $15,000+ for it.  If we do, we’d pay off the $11,000 debt and have $4000-$5000 for the new vehicle.

Looks good on paper doesn’t it?  But let me tell you, it sure doesn’t feel good.

As mentioned above, we love our van.  We love having a sleek, reliable vehicle that also has handy features (leather seats, DVD player, automatic doors, & butt warmers).  It’ll be sad to see it go.  But even when we “cook the books”, we can’t make ends meet too much longer with a $300+ monthly vehicle payment.

So…

Anyone have any advice on selling a vehicle?

I’ve either totaled or traded-in my previous vehicles, so I have no clue how to go about this.  I guess we did sell my wife’s old car to her folks, but that happened so fast that I hardly had time to pay attention.  Plus her Dad took care of everything…before I knew what was going on, I had a check in my hand.

Hopefully history will repeat itself.

Until next time,

-DD

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