Dearest Rachel –
Well, I promised I would tell you about it, and here we are; after over five years of driving your car around, Daniel finally has a car he can call his own. It has everything he wanted in a car (which, admittedly, wasn’t much to begin with, but thus far, he hasn’t had them):
Anything else the vehicle might have had was a bonus, as far as he was concerned; although he discovered after several test drives on Friday that he preferred a gearshift rather than a dial, causing him to reject the Cherokee Will had initially recommended him for a smaller Compass. Just as well, though, since he’s not nearly as likely to be conveying a large group of people or stuff like I expect to (and have from time to time already).
Honestly, given that he’s accustomed himself to your PT Cruiser, I half-expected him to need and want nothing more than a small sedan, but Lars had recommended to me that he’d be better off with a utility model – and to be fair, that’s basically all that Jeep offers, as far as I know. In any event, Daniel had informed me when we thought we would be looking into Nissan models that he didn’t want anything low-slung – getting into Logan’s car, for instance, felt like “sitting on the ground” – so the utility frame turns out to be perfectly comfortable for him.
Now I mentioned that, once he’d made his decision on Friday, the dealership had to bring in the precise model with the desired features from a different dealership, so we had to return at a later date to pick it up. They’d actually taken delivery on Saturday (the speed and efficiency of which Will described as nothing short of miraculous), but between our various commitments – in the booth on Saturday afternoon for me, and our mutual one at Sparks on Monday – we thought it best to wait until yesterday.
And a good thing, too; we made it down there at about half-past ten, but between Will walking Daniel through the features – including setting him up with the Jeep app to connect to the car, both to unlock and start the car, should he so desire – and his having to sign the various paperwork for both purchase and financing, we weren’t out of there until well after one. Had we tried to go down there on Monday, we wouldn’t have been able to predict when we would have been back home to bundle ourselves off to Awana.
You might notice that I mentioned financing in the last paragraph, which probably has you questioning ‘why,’ when we could easily pay for the vehicle up front (and I intended to handle with my own funds; not out of any paternalistic “Bank of Dad” approach, but as a means to transfer assets from myself to him, since I have a larger portfolio – both ‘my’ half of your parents’ legacy and half of ‘yours,’ whereas he only has his half of what you left us – while he likely has more time in which he’ll be needing it. That, and the more I can put into his hands now, the less will need to go through probate and the like one day). Well, it would seem that Daniel’s credit rating is somewhat lacking in history; it was recommended that he pay a portion of the sales price over time, in order to beef up that history and improve that rating.
Although, when I asked what his rating was (after we’d signed most of the papers already), I discovered that it was actually a dozen or so points better than mine, so it suddenly felt silly to have done this. Then again, it so happens that the price was marked down by some sixteen hundred dollars for taking the option to finance. Given that he’s required to make a minimum of seven payments to pay the car off (and to be eligible for said discount), if he pays enough of the balance earlier on in the course of the process, and finishes paying for it by the end of next April, he should be paying out considerably less in the way of interest than he saves by financing the car in the first place. I’d hoped to have more put down in the way of a down payment, but the arrangements had been made; we’ll sort the balance out over the next seven months.
The two of us convoyed our way home, avoiding the toll roads, since Daniel’s car obviously isn’t set up with a transponder sticker (that, and he’d just as soon not drive on the highways anyway – although I think he’ll have to at some point). I hope to get that taken care of either this morning or maybe tomorrow. I definitely need to get him set up for auto insurance, in any event, and I’ve already contacted the agent that set me up with Progressive after I’d bought the Explorer earlier this year, so hopefully we’re going to have things all set in short order.
Later today, he’ll probably be using it to head out and grab his weekly sandwich-and-smoothie combo – he’s doing that on his own as often as not these days, and now that he has a vehicle that’s his own, even more so, I should expect.
Meanwhile, at some point, we need to get in touch with the company that did your car’s paint job. Not only does it need a touch-up, but the passenger side mirror is hanging on by a wire or two; I think it happened about the same time as my old Taurus’ was damaged, probably by the same wind (I hope, as I don’t want to believe that vandals exist in this neighborhood). Our regular body shop thinks the reconnection is beyond their abilities, so maybe the place that did the paint work would be able to put it to rights before we put it into storage for good.
Be that as it may, I’d like to hope that you’d be pleased that the new normal we keep building for ourselves is improving. It’s nothing compared to the existence you enjoy these days, to be sure, but it’s not bad at all.
