When I was 18 years old, I received some money from a car accident settlement and bought my very own car. It was a 1988 Brown Dodge Shadow and I paid $2700 for it. For the most part, it was a good little car. The previous owner was an older man and he took pretty good care of it. It did have a few quirks about it though. One day in the blazing 110 degree weather, I was heading over to a friends house for a lunch date. I got into the car and wanted to roll the window down. It had electric windows and when I pushed the button to roll the window down, it didn't roll down. I was dying. I can't remember 100% but I don't think the air conditioner worked in the car because I drove over to my friends house dying of heat! I quickly realized that after I started my car, if I turned the key back just a tiny bit, the window's would roll down. I was sure glad to have figured that out as summer's are dang hot where I live!
I also remember that my very first debt was because of this car. It had a steering shaft problem. I took it to a service center only to find out that it would take a week to fix and I believe the cost would be $1200 to fix. I didn't have the money, but I had a credit card, and that my friends, is where I lost my financial way...(just want to throw out there that we are currently debt free and it is so liberating...you should try it!)
That little car served me well. I had it when Patrick and I got married. Since Patrick had only a motorcycle at the time, my car became our car. When we moved out to Utah, we packed that little car up with all my stuff (Patrick had already been living in Utah), and drove it across the dessert to the Great Salt Lake area.
Shortly after being married, we realized that we needed another car. One car just wasn't cutting it. So we headed to the local car dealership, naive as brand new babies. We bought a car but because neither of us had any sense or negotiating skills, we litterally got screwed! I'm talking we bought a car that was 3 years old and when everything was all said and done, we paid $23,000 for it. That would have been ok if it were a BMW or even a Honda Civic, but we paid that much money for a Plymouth Neon...A PLYMOUTH NEON!!! Let's just say that we both learned our lesson. So, the Neon became my car and the Shadow became Patrick's car.
During the second year of our marriage, Patrick moved out to Los Angeles to work and train in the mortgage business. I stayed out in Utah as I had a job (actually 2 jobs. He drove the Shadow from Salt Lake to LA. Of course the Shadow didn't make it and somewhere in Nevada, the timing belt broke and the car had to be towed and fixed at the nearest service center.
During that summer (1998), Patrick had decided to surprise me one night in the wee hours by driving that Shadow from LA to Utah to see me, He made it there and back just fine...I surprised him on the phone about 4 weeks later with the news that he was going to be a dad.
In November of 1998, I quit one of my jobs and flew down to LA to pick my man up for good. We then drove the Shadow up to Sacramento to visit my family for Thanksgiving. Then we headed back to Utah...we put a lot of miles on that car. Shortly after returning to Utah, we realized that it was time to sell the Shadow. We found a young kid who bought it for $600...and we washed our hands of it...or so we thought.
About a year after selling that car, we got a letter from the DMV asking us for proof of insurance for it because it was involved in a crash that totaled it. I started to freak out as I didn't want to be responsible for an accident that we weren't involved in. Apparantly, the kid who bought the car never transferred ownership and since it was the first time that we had sold a car, we didn't know that we needed to send something off to the DMV clearing us from such happenings. It all worked out in the end, but it was kind of sad knowing that the little brown Dodge Shadow had met its doom...He was a good little car...I will never forget him.
