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.

All of this is to say, we need to buy a new car. This is one of the worst times to need to buy a new car, because automobile tariffs have been implemented in April 2025. We are hoping to find a vehicle in inventory to avoid the new fees. It does feel like a failure to make such a large purchase when you have committed to purchasing as little as possible for a year. If the sensor failure did not endanger our safety, we would simply ignore the problem, but we cannot do that in this case.

In addition to needing to buy an entire car this year, I am also facing the need to buy a new computer. I don't want a new computer at all, but Windows 10 support will end in mid-October 2025 unless Microsoft pushes back that date. The lack of safety updates will make my computer unsafe to use for banking and other sensitive uses. I am considering installing a Linux operating system and keeping the computer, but I will not have use of some software that is not Linux-compatible. Eventually, though, I will need a new PC.

While I'm feeling sorry for myself about not meeting this arbitrary goal, and feeling even more frustrated about the auto tariffs, I suppose it doesn't matter whether I technically "fail" this low-buy year or not. Even if I end up spending money I didn't plan to on a car or a computer, that does not mean I need to go back to spending less mindfully. That would be a sunk cost fallacy. I'll continue to avoid shopping for fun and cleaning out my house of unnecessary items regardless.