We bought a new car yesterday! Perhaps not the best possible move in our situation, given we had around $7,000 worth of negative equity in our old vehicle, but it was aging, not overly comfortable for us, and got abysmal gas mileage. The new car is a 2006.5 Kia Optima EX V6 -- fully loaded. Yeah, every option. Including the incredibly sweet 360 watt Infinity sound system. Muahahaha.

The only Kia dealership here in town, Bob Rohrman Kia, is not a dealership we thought we'd ever do business with again. Rohrman owns like 100 dealerships (no joke -- Google it; the guy owns a ton of dealerships!). So you almost can't buy a car in Lafayette without going to one of his stores. Only GM cars would allow you to escape him.

We had a prior horrible experience with the dealership. They robbed us bad on a deal. We traded in a car we owed probably $150 on (a single payment). They gave us $800 for it (probably well below black book, but we didn't know any better). ADDED THAT $800 BACK ONTO THE CONTRACT. (NOTE: they just "stole" our car!). THEN A MONTH LATER SUED US FOR $800!!! Saying we owed money on the car which we did not. Anyway.

That was around 8 years ago so we gave them another chance. We drove into the fairgrounds (they move all their cars, from all their dealerships in town, to the fairgrounds like 5-6 times every summer). Got a random salesperson named Steve Smith. We first wanted to look at a Sonata, and Steve took us out for a test drive in one, and was very non-salesy, very low key. Impressive. We left and the next day were thinking about the Optima and wanted to check it out. We went back and asked Steve for a test drive. He gave us the keys and said he had some other stuff to do, and asked if we minded going without him. I prefer that, of course, so off we went. We immediately knew we wanted the Optima.

So now down to the deal. We had a 2001 Mazda Tribute LX. NADA retail on it is $9500 or so. Black book is $7830ish. We owed $14,200 on it. We had $3,000 in cash and there's $1,000 rebate on the Optima right now. The dealer offered us $8800 on the trade, not bad really. That leaves some negative equity. So we weren't sure how the deal was going to go, and we figured the dealer was going to add some ridiculous add-ons like some will do.

Well, we were surprised. Everything was straight and above-board. No add-ons, no padding of the interest rate, and no trying to inflate sales tax. They didn't rob us! Amazing!