1 car? 2 cars? new car?

jaydeeuk1

Keep the getz. Wife and I have a dinky Toyota iq as our main car with 8month old and we've coped fine with car seat and pushchair and shopping and it doesn't even have a boot!

Stick audi on ebay honestly, should get a good few hundred quid if it has tax and mot.

londonTiger

Puddickle wrote: »

No - babies aren't cash positive, but I'm not shifting on that point - there will be another baby, we just have to make it work.

a second child isn't actually hugely more costly than a single child, you have to spend around the same amount of time raising one child than two. cooking for 2 people is just a little bit more time consuming than one.

Ecoomies of scale of raising kids, if you want 2-3 kids, get them all out in one go I say.

londonTiger

Puddickle wrote: »

Hi,
Complete newbie to these forums so hope I've found the right place to post this.

We're really trying to pay off our (huge) debts and have a strict no more credit policy in our house.

We're really struggling with our current car situation. We have 2 cars a Y reg Audi A3, and an 04 Hyundai Getz. The Audi is my husbands main car and on its last legs, and we haven't had the money to service either car for about 5 years. It currently has all sorts of issues and needs the battery unplugging every night, ran out of petrol today due to a faulty gauge etc etc but it is a big enough car for our growing family (have a toddler, would like another one soon).
The Hyundai is the small runaround that I use to get to work (in a city) and drop off at nursery etc, it only has 3 doors in comparison to the Audi's 5.
Both cars have been paid off so are not costing us money in that sense.

We have a few options:

1. stay as we are, struggle on with both.

2. Go down to one car. Due to the problems with the Audi, it would make sense for this to be the Hyundai... this isn't really big enough for us as a family, and it would need a big service to make sure that it was up to the job of the extra miles. I'm willing to use public transport with the toddler as we live in a city.

3. Combine both into a cheap reliable runaround. We wouldn't get much for either car (the Hyundai has a big old dent in the roof where some nice individual decided to take a run across the roofs of some cars down our road).

4. (we've pretty much written off this option). Put our money into a bigger better car, that we would have to get more debt for.

Any clever ideas on what we could do with this situation to get the most out of our cars whilst keeping it debt free as possible?

yeah, you should definately downsize, no service in 5 years? have you done work on it yourself? brakes, camblets, liquid changes etc need to be take care of. Batteries dont last more than 5 years so is probably dead for all intents and purpose and it's just about starting up the car and the alternator is doing all the work with the electrics.

if you both need to use sme sort of transport then a scooter and car is doable. a scooter is cheap to run, insure and tax. running costs are marginal