It's official - I own my car!!

I just checked the status of my recent car payment and it's finally been processed!

You know what that means?

I officially own my car! No more car payments on it! Yay!!!

My 1st ever car was an older one my parents gave me and bought outright when I was in high school (a '95 white Chevy Corsica). I drove that baby for almost 8 years straight.

By the time I graduated college (December 2007) it was starting to have one problem after another and knowing I might be commuting to work for awhile that summer I wanted to get something somewhat newer that got better gas mileage and was commuter friendly so after doing some number crunching that spring (March 2008 to be exact) and realizing that I could afford car payments with my budget, I decided to do some looking.

At the time, hubby had a Chevy Aveo hatchback and while I wasn't crazy about the hatchback, I was used to car - he had taught me how to drive stick on it. I looked at those as well as test drove a Mazda 3 or 6 (I don't remember) - the Mazda was nice and fully loaded, but it wasn't the one I had drove all the way out there to see (as it had been sold a few days prior) and there was no way they could crunch the numbers enough to get it into my allotted budget for car payments. Really wanting to buy a car on my own, I kept looking and came across a listing for a 2004 black Chevy Aveo sedan with manual transmission in the adjoining town to my college town. We went and looked at it, took it for a test drove and the next morning I traded in Cory (my Corsica) and drove Avy off the lot and to work.

The only downfall that the dealer failed to bring to my attention was that for whatever reason, only on the 2004 Aveos, Chevy didn't include air conditioning as a standard feature! This has really sucked in the summer when it's like a million degrees out and I have to pull my hair up, roll ALL the windows down and drive fast enough to circulate the air. That's part of the reason Jay and I hung out at home a lot during the day last summer - I hated driving an infant around like that in the heat anymore than I had to.

I'm excited though as this means that the money we were using on my monthly car payments can now go towards hubby's car payments and we can get his paid off sooner and I can get a newer car with air conditioning and more space (because a commuter car with 1 small child is okay for now, but we are planning on having at least 1 more kid sometime in the future). Truth is, I've already started looking and am interested in the Mazda 6 or a 2010/2011 Chevy Malibu (can ya tell I'm a Chevy gal?) in either black or silver. I want a mid-sized sedan with a little bit of a sporty look to it - I refuse to ever own a mini-van or SUV (no offense to those of you that do own those typical "mom" vehicles, but those just aren't me, I like sporty but practical).

I'm also excited though as this is the 1st car that *I* officially own! I'm looking forward to getting that title in the mail, and then taking it to *finally* get it changed to my married name (I was told by the bank that my loan was originally through that I couldn't do that until after it was paid off and I had it in my hands).

I'm seriously a bit giddy!