Low Buy Failure?
March brought a few unwelcome surprises to my low-buy year. I've been thinking about what would constitute a "failure" of a low-buy initiative and whether I am skirting that territory. To be fair, the calamities my spouse and I are dealing with are not of our doing. We drive our cars into the ground, and we started last year (2024) with two relatively old cars. I was driving a 1999 Honda Accord (!) with only 50k miles. The mileage was very low because the car had previously belonged to my husband's grandma, who seldom drove it. In October of 2024, I bought a brand-new Toyota Corolla because the Honda was starting to need repairs and I was unwilling to pay the increased maintenance cost. My husband's 2017 Hyundai Accent is still running, but it has 195k miles as of April 2025. It is not an old car, but the mileage is very high and it needs a costly sensor repair that we are unwilling to pay for, given that the car's Kelley Blue Book value is approximately $1k...