Farewell Fiero

This weekend I sold my Fiero.  This car was beautiful.  It was a 1984 2m4, 33,000 original miles.  Bright red.  I bought the car when I was in college and put less than 3,000 miles on it. Here's a picture of it, a parting shot.  I hadn't really driven the car in 5 years, so it was probably time to sell.  Would I have rather kept it?  Yeah.  Sunk money into it for tires and a likely ac repair?  Absolutely.  But when you are getting out of debt you don't do that.  Part of getting out of debt is sacrifice.
The sacrifice of the Fiero enabled Aleece and I to pay off all of the furniture (dining room table/chairs and lovely leather reclining sectional) that we bought a month before we got in to Dave Ramsey.  In addition, it let us pay my summer tuition without going on a shoestring budget for two weeks.  The peace of mind we got from selling the car is far superior to having my dad continue to store a car I haven't driven in five years.

I know I make it sound like a no-brainer, but it wasn't.  Driving it up to Grayling to put out to sell was tough.  I fell back in love within the first mile.  But we had more important things to do than to love a car.  Why is that so hard for some people to understand?

Here I am selling a car that my dad and I picked out together, a car that I pined for, and made payments on for 3 years.  I will never forget the last few days I spent as a student at Albion College - I drove this around campus.  I took the first load of clothes/dorm stuff and met my mom half way in order to swap my Grand Prix for the Fiero and went back to school.  I drove home at the end of an incredibly hard year in this car.  This car is a part of my final memories of Albion.  This car is an important part of that chapter of my life.  It was also a tool to speed up what Aleece and I are trying to do.

The frustrating part is the lack of support some people have been willing to offer.  I don't know that I can stand to hear, "You two are crazy," again for at least a few weeks.  Here I am sacrificing something that was important to me while other people can't give up the simplest of things that would enable them change their lives as they know it.  You don't have to sell a car, but it might help.  You don't have to pack most of your lunches.  You also don't have to go on a credit card binge to be happy.  (In fact, I closed all three credit cards I had this weekend - all already had a zero balance but I hadn't closed them yet).

The smallest changes can have huge effects on your life if only you let them.  If you doubt, criticize and belittle other people for attempting to create a better life you will never make it.  You will never live free from debt.  You will never have the sense of freedom that killing debt brings.

We are not debt free yet, but we are working.  After the sale of the Fiero, we have now paid off 15.52% of the debt we began working on.  We have the Insight to pay off (ETA December-January), then we start killing our student loans.