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A few weeks ago, my wife and I stopped by the Kia dealership where we had purchased a new 2006 Spectra in January.  It’s the end of the 2006 model year (in case you hadn’t noticed from your local ads) and they’re dealing.  It was the end of the month, and they needed another sale.  They offered to accept our 2006 Spectra EX with 11,500 miles on it as a trade on a brand NEW 2006 Spectra EX with 300 miles on it.  All we had to do way say “yea” or “nay”.

My wife has never qualified for a loan on her own, and we decided to give it a try.  Well … they approved her!  Not only that, she qualified for an 8% interest loan!  Which meant the payments would be going down a bit.  So we decided to accept the deal.  We traded our used car in on a brand new one that was virtually identical in all ways except it was … new.  And the payments went down by $25/mo for our efforts.  WHOOPPEE!!

That was nice, but my wife decided since she’s now the proud owner of a brand new car, she didn’t want to keep carpooling with me to work.  She said, “It’s time you got your own car!”  I’m like, “Huh?  I’ve had a car until we traded it in on a new one for you!”  Ya can’t argue with the boss, so I started looking for another vehicle.

After visiting several dealerships and test-driving a bunch of cars, I narrowed things down to either a new Nissan Versa or a Sentra.  In the end, I decided on a Sentra.  You know, one of those boxy little things your mother had for years and years…

Well, not quite!  Nissan has completely redesigned the Sentra’s for 2007.  I took a few for a test drive and decided I wanted one in Blue Onyx with a Tan Leather interior.  That meant I wanted an SL model.  Oh, and I also want a sun roof.

I hooked up with the fleet sales guy at a local dealership and he did some poking around.  He said Blue Sentra SLs with a sun roof are extremely rare.  In fact, there was only one scheduled to be shipped into the region before the end of the year, and it was due in early December.  But it’s headed to a dealer in another city.

I told him, “That’s my car!” and asked him to do whatever it took to snag it before someone else got it.  This was Saturday, November 4th (a week ago).

Saturday, November 11th started out for me like any other Saturday.  I dropped my wife at work, then headed over to the PO to see what was haunting my PO Box.  Well, the PO was closed.  Harumph.  Ok, next stop, the bank to make a deposit.  The bank is on 7th Street and Missouri.  I was on 7th Avenue and went over to Missouri.  I got two blocks and then discovered that Missouri was closed to thru traffic.  Crap.  Back to 7th Ave and over to Bethany Home Rd.  Surely I could cut over and go down 7th St.  Well, when I got to that intersection, a sign said it was closed as well.  Double-crap!  Oh, screw it.  I turned and headed down 7th St anyway.  I pulled into the shopping center where the bank is, parked, and headed over to the bank.  And then I saw … it was CLOSED.  Triple-crap!!!

Are we sensing a theme here?  I decided to stash the deposit into the ATM and be done with it.  Thank goodness IT wasn’t closed.

Then I headed back to my car and just sat there for a while.  I noticed a couple of people standing outside their cars looking at the sky.  Curious, I got out and looked around as well.  Lo and behold, here comes this low-flying B-38 bomber crawling along barely over the treetops.  Well, that sounds good, but trees here don’t grow very high.  In any case, it wasn’t more than a few hundred feet up.  But it was going so slow … I was honestly waiting for it to fall out of the sky!

Then it dawned on me.  This was Veteran’s Day!  No wonder things were closed!  Including the streets, because of the parade.  Well, duh!

On a whim, I decided to stop by the car dealership (remember them) to check on the status of my new car.  I wanted to know if it was still on track for an early December delivery.  Anyway, it was on the way home.  A friend called and I mentioned this to him, and he said, “Heck, don’t waste your time.  You know those car guys.  When your car is in, they’ll be calling you like there’s no tomorrow!  Let them do their job and don’t pester them.”  I thought, “Thanks for sharing” and decided to check anyway.  Hey, it’s on the way home.

I got to the dealership and tracked down the fleet sales guy, Kirk, and told him I was wondering about the status of my new car.  He disappeared for a while, and when he came back he looked directly at me and said, “They’ve adjusted the delivery date.  It’s now showing 10/30.”  I said, “Oh, you mean 11/30.”  He said, “Nope.  10/30.”  I said, “Well, that’s … early last week.  Before I even talked with you about it.”  “Yup.”  I’m thinking, “Oh crap.”

Kirk went off to try to track down the car that was supposedly on a lot somewhere.  It was 3:30 PM, and I wanted to get home.  About 4PM, Kirk announced they had found the car.  It wasn’t sold, and was exactly as we’d discussed.  But the dealer was 100 miles away and they were getting ready to close.  And they’re closed on Sunday.  (Figures.)  They’d be happy to go get it, but … they wanted to be sure I’m serious about this.

If there’s one thing you can count on from car dealers, they’ll do just about ANYTHING to lock in a deal.  In this case, I offered to leave a $100 deposit.  Nope, they wanted do the deal.  Right now.  Before the car is here.  Hmmm…. well, it WAS the car I wanted.  But I was planning on getting something around Thanksgiving.  Oh, well.

So we started haggling over the deal.  Luckily, I’d been working the numbers the previous week, so I knew what was what.  I even got preapproved at the bank, although it wasn’t a very nice number they quoted me.  (There’s something on my credit reports that doesn’t belong there, and I wrote them a stern letter, as well as filed disputes with the credit bureaus.  None of this had taken effect yet — which was one more reason I wanted to wait until Thanksgiving, to give this stuff some time to work thorugh.)

Anyway, the Good News is that one of the credit bureaus DID make the correction already, so my score with them was where it should have been.  And after a lot of hand-waving and foot-shuffling, I stood my ground and got these guys to get a quote from my bank.  They finally got to the numbers I was expecting, but by now it was 5:30 PM.

To make a long story short, I finally got done with the paperwork at about 6:40PM.  My wife got off work at 6:30PM and I needed to leave by 6PM to get there in time to meet her.  She had to wait a bit, but she was very happy to learn that I was getting my own car — and that I didn’t need her name on the loan to get the better interest rate.

Today, Sunday, I went by the dealership and took delivery of my brand new car — an Onyx Blue 2007 Nissan Sentra SL.  It’s a VERY COOL car.

 

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