MEET THE MEGAVAN!
Kyle and I have been thinking of upgrading our minivan for awhile now. We did research online of the different 12 passenger vans available. We decided to go check out a used 2009 Chevy Express at a dealership in Murray. The dealership was actually right down the street from the cemetery where Grandpa Lars and Nana are buried.
The dealership didn’t actually have it when we got there, they said it was at their other location. But the salesman was willing to go get it and bring it back so we wouldn’t have to drive all the way to the other dealership. So we got some lunch, and headed over to the cemetery for a bit. Then when the salesman called back to say he was almost back we loaded the kids back up and headed back to the dealership. When the van got there I got to take it for a test drive around the block. Then I switched with Kyle so he could have a turn to take it around the block. Then we dropped the salesman off at the dealership and Kyle got the ok to take it for a drive on the freeway.
We actually spent the rest of the day at the dealership. Poor Chloe spent her birthday at the dealership instead of at home with a cake. But we went through having the dealer test drive our minivan to give us a trade in quote, and Kyle spent a good chunk of time on the phone with his mom to see if she was serious about buying our van (she had expressed an interest in it). Kyle spent the better part of the phone call trying to get a straight answer out of her, which left me to watch 5 kids and answer all the salesman’s questions. I kept telling him that I wasn’t going to make ANY decisions without Kyle. Yes, I would be the primary driver of the van but I wasn’t buying it by myself! But I did flat out tell the salesman that we are trying to keep the payments at $250 or lower and we didn’t want a loan that was longer than 60 months. His eyes nearly popped out of his head when I said that. But long story short, Karen did decide to buy our van and offered us $5000 which was a couple hundred more than the dealer would give us for a trade in. In addition to that we had $3600 for a down, so with that the $21,000 before taxes and fees was brought down to $13,300 that we had to finance and our payments will be about $247. Which is just awesome! 🙂 It was previously a rental van and had about 15,000 miles on it. It’s still under the factory warranty, and now the kids can sit where ever they want instead of being squished together like the three on the back seat of the mini van were.
My parents had a 15 passenger van, that Ethan nick named the monster van. So since this van only seats 12 we decided to call it the MegaVan. Ethan really likes that name because there is a video game that he likes to play called MegaMan. 😉