Been There, Done That: Car shopping and a great flag rescue

I thought when we replaced our little 2007 Jeep Liberty with a 2010 Ford Escape four years ago that we were done buying cars. We paid off the Escape last January. No more car payments, and I thought this should last me as long as I plan on being out in the working world. But a 15-year-old car is bound to start showing its age, especially with almost 185,000 miles on it.

I hate car shopping — driving around from lot to lot, looking at car after car, salespeople circling, the crazy dance of finding a lender, agreeing to a price, yada, yada. I don’t want to play that game. And we didn’t. I called a local lender we already have a couple things with and got pre-approved on the condition that we buy a 2017 or newer with 100k miles or less. Cool, we were already looking for that. They gave us a letter to give to the dealership when we find our new ride.