As many of you may have suspected, this happened to us. Our oldest son was in college at the time and we didn’t need the extra expense of replacing a vehicle.
We had three vehicles at the time. The truck that caught on fire that we had a loan on, my van which was paid for and my husband’s older vehicle that was paid for and that our son took to college some 5 hours from home.
Since we were paying for college and we really didn’t want to go car/truck shopping, we decided that we would not replace the truck and put the insurance money in the bank. We had purchased the truck used about 15 months prior to the accident and it didn’t have a warranty on it. To this day we don’t know why it caught on fire but were thankful that my husband was able to pull over on a busy highway and get out in time. Also a volunteer fire fighter was behind him and he was able to help my husband.
How did we come to our decision? For the first 10 years of our marriage we lived in Waterloo, Iowa and we had one car. We both worked and had to get up quite early in order for me to get to work and my husband then to drive himself to work. Now living in a town of 11,000 we knew we could get by with one car for me, my husband and our youngest son. We could both walk to work without a problem. Our son could take the bus to school.
Instead of going into debt, we applied the money towards our son’s college education and some needed home repairs. A few years later when our finances were much better my husband was able to buy another truck.
During those years of having one family vehicle I made some changes. I changed hair salons and nail salons to ones that were within walking distance. We communicated when we needed the van for any reason and it wasn’t that bad. Even when the van was in the shop for repairs, we were able to walk to wherever we needed to go.
If we had lived in a larger city such as Waterloo, my husband would have had our van during the day and I would have walked to wherever I needed to go or I would have stayed home. As Lyn said in her comment, you save money by not going anywhere. Also, if I needed to go somewhere I had friends to call and if I would have been working at the time, I would have car pooled or worked something out. Having one vehicle is an inconvenience but it is not impossible to live life with only one car.
Sometimes we think we have no choices, but we really do.
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