Becoming a one car household

About 2 months ago we realized how little we drove the Jeep (our second car along with the Mazda we bought a year ago). With me staying at home with Luke there weren't a lot of days I needed a car so Matt would drive the Mazda (we figured it saved $1.75/day he drove the Mazda instead of the Jeep). 

We started talking about downsizing to just one car.  We live in a very walkable neighborhood so Luke and I have plenty of chances to get out.  Plus, Matt's been taking at least a half day a week (if not a whole day off) which gives me a car to run errands or go into work.  In the last 6 weeks I think we've needed 2 cars twice.  Seriously.  It didn't make sense to pay insurance on two cars, keep up maintenance, gas, etc.  I'm all about simplifying too so one less car sounded good to me.

Then a few weeks ago Matt decided to start riding his bike to work 3 days a week; it's a 10 mile trip one way.  It takes some time (an hour) but this way he gets his workout in and saves more gas money.  And it's good for the environment.  Once he started doing that it became really silly to have 2 cars primarily sitting in the garage.  Luke & I run errands on the days Matt bikes (even though the Jeep's been sitting in the garage the whole time).  He plans to bike as far into the winter as he can.  

We decided to sell the Jeep since it was older and didn't get as good of mileage as the Mazda.  We posted it on Craigslist and had a few people come check it out but then ended up selling it to Matt's brother, the same one who bought the jet skis from us a few months ago.  He's really helping us get some more space in the garage.  We bought the Jeep from one of Matt's brothers and sold it to another one.  And when we bought the Jeep we sold Matt's car to a third brother.  Apparently we just trade cars around the family. 

A few months ago I shared this picture:

At the time we had just sold the green and yellow jet skis after having 3 jet skis and 2 cars in the garage for 7 months. Now all we have in our garage are the Mazda and one jet ski.  Just 2 things!  We had seating for 19 at the start of the summer and now down to just 9 (legally...I'm pretty sure our jet ski alone could fit 8 people).  It's incredible how much more space we have in the garage. 

I'm really excited to cancel to Jeep insurance policy and get that money back, only have to fuel one car (which isn't driven very often as is), and only have to maintain a relatively new car.  We do plan to replace the Jeep within a year, mainly because right now we have no way of hauling our jet ski up to the lake (something we did consider before selling it).   Until then though, I'm going to really enjoy all this garage space and money saved.