How I Almost Bought an $80,000 Car

Think temptation doesn’t happen to the best of us?  Think again  Here’s a personal story on why I started MoneyAhoy.com and how I almost blew $80,000 on a new sports car!

How I Almost Bought an $80,000 Car – Background

My wife and I are natural born savers.  We have always lived well below our means and put a premium on making due with less expensive solutions to our problems.  Because we were terrible at taking our money and investing it, much of it was sitting in money market accounts collecting interest.  Well, you may be able to imagine that after 8-10 years of modest living, we built up quite a sizable pile of cash.

How I Almost Bought an $80,000 Car – Temptation

After a while, I began to get a little bit of an itch.  What were we doing with all of this cash?!?  “It should be spent somehow, right?” I found myself saying…  Well, that’s when I let my mind start to wander on all the things that $80,000 cash could grant.

Through some kind of twisted mental process, I had convinced myself that the best use for the money would be  a sports car – an $80,000 BMW M3 Sports car to be exact.  I spent countless hours watching M3 videos, reading up on all the specs, and comparing it against other similar sports cars.  My wife wasn’t necessarily 100% in love with the idea, but she didn’t shoot down the idea either.  She basically left it up to me if I should get the car or not.  I was extremely close to being 100% mentally prepared to pull the trigger – I was literally days away from visiting the BMW dealership…

How I Almost Bought an $80,000 Car – MoneyAhoy.com Was Born

However, something in the back of my head was telling me that this decision wasn’t quite right for me.  I’d never owned anything close to a sports car.  A sports car really would make me look cool, but heck, I really didn’t even like working on cars much at all…

It’s at about this point in time where I somehow stumbled across Mr. Money Mustache.  This blog changed everything for me – I realized that I could take all of our hard earned money and use it to allow both my wife and me to retire early!  Why hadn’t this idea ever seriously occurred to us before?  I was about to forfeit more than two years of our working lives (the extra time we’d have to work to break even) just to get a flashy car – talk about insane in the membrane!

It was out of the ashes of this near financial death sentence that MoneyAhoy.com was born.  One of the main reasons I created this blog was to actually PREVENT myself from buying the M3!  I knew that if I started writing about saving, making, and investing money, I wouldn’t be able to actually blow the money on the car.  I used the principle of auto-suggestion to save myself from financial ruin  I created a type of mental wall to prevent frivolous spending.  I was able to successfully fool my brain long enough, through this blog, until the desire to own a sports car completely dissolved away!!

How I Almost Bought an $80,000 Car – Final Thoughts

Now that MoneyAhoy.com has been around for a just over a year, I can safely say that the desire to purchase a M3 is 100% gone  I’m happy with my little Corolla that gets nearly triple the mpg, saves hundreds on car insurance each year, will save me thousands on maintenance over the years, and will probably keep me safer as it won’t encourage “crazy sports car type driving”.  The Corolla doesn’t look as flashy, and the 0-60 has got to be in the double digits.  But, I’ll get MUCH more enjoyment out of retiring 2-3 years earlier with my wife than I ever could out of some quick accelerating hunk of metal!

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