Sometimes we’re forced to make a decision where there are no great options. The expression “caught between a rock and a hard place” comes to mind. Such a decision was necessary recently, when Jessica and I traded in our leased van for another lease, a smaller compact SUV.
When you lease a vehicle, part of the agreement is to stay under a certain amount of miles per year, for however many years you have the vehicle. There’s a fee for each mile you go over that agreed upon amount. With our move into a house further away from Children’s Hospital and Namine being in the hospital more recently, we were over our miles. Like, way over. And the more we drove, the higher and higher the fee would be when we turned in our lease.
The end goal is for us to stop leasing and own a vehicle, for two big reasons. The first is to have it modified to make it easier for Namine to transfer into as a passenger. The second is too have it modified further with hand controls so she can learn to drive.
Since we still had about a year to go on our lease, we started looking into options. Buying out our leased van wasn’t ideal, since we’d prefer to modify a brand new vehicle and get the most out of it, since that would also need to be the vehicle Namine would end up driving herself. But even that price, due in part to the fees in mile overages, was prohibitive to us.
Circumstances for both purchasing and leasing vehicles have changed significantly since we did this in the past. As a result, it was also too expensive for us to buy a van. It was also expensive to even lease a new one. In order to keep our monthly payment to something manageable, we settled for a new lease on a smaller vehicle.
Coming from our van to a smaller SUV has been an adjustment, to be sure. Namine’s wheelchair doesn’t fit in the back unless we break it down, as much as can be done. It’s a solid body chair, so it doesn’t really collapse. The wheels do come off, however, and the backrest does fold down.
We keep one seat in the car folded down, and Namine climbs up into the back and into the other seat. The transfer from her chair into the car isn’t as much of a height difference as in the van, but there is a longer distance for her to crawl.
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