Like many families, ours has been hit hard with the impacts of COVID-19, increasing fuel prices, and employment changes the past couple of years. I’m relatively lucky to have an older Hybrid car myself, but my oldest daughter uses my mini-van and it chugs gas like a college student chugs energy drinks while cramming for exams. Or in my case, like I used to chug iced coffees while working on 15+ hour art assignments that I had all of 2-3 days to complete while a single mom.

Needless to say, it’s not a great situation when gas is $5.03 a gallon and your car gets like 15MPG on average. This has left me searching heavily to get her an older hybrid like I have, mostly because I know exactly what kind of repairs it might need, and how to do some of those myself. As I’ve done some on my 2008 Prius, and could easily do the same on another 2nd Gen Prius if I could get my hands on one for her. Sadly for me, it looks like I’m not the only one on a scramble to find an affordable hybrid car that helps us not bleed so much money at the pump. Many people are finding that the car shortage is hitting even hybrids, and not just the trucks and SVU’s it had been noted as hitting before.

I’m still looking for a hybrid I can afford, and if I can find a 2004 – 2009 Prius at a price we can afford the monthly payments on, I’d love to try and add one to the family. I know there are risks with buying a used vehicle, and thankfully from owning my own 2008 Prius for the past 3.25 years, I have a decent enough idea of what I can and can’t do.

One thing I have to take into consideration is monthly payments, and I’ve found not a lot of actual car dealership websites have very good calculators that actually work when I try and use them. So I was happy to come across CarPaymentCalculator.net, which allows me to not only calculate payments on a car loan, but lets me input a monthly budget and lets me figure out how expensive of a car I can actually get. They also show recent auto loan interest rates, to further make sure I am knowing exactly what I might be looking at as I go through the car consideration process.

They also have other neat calculators, like one that can calculate your fuel budget. Plus another that can show you how to save money with biweekly payments, which maybe is something I should look into because honestly I had never even thought of that before. I also love that they give you a custom link once you use the calculator, you can send the results to yourself, to your partner, or to even use against the numbers given to you buy a dealership.

While right now I can’t find a hybrid that I believe I can afford the payments of just yet. I will continue looking, and keep on hoping that the gas prices will mellow down relatively soon. I don’t know how summer travel plans are going to work for many people if they keep up as badly as they are. I was looking forward to taking a trip to Seattle, but might need to bench that for now. Goodness knows the prices are worse over there than they are here, even just the extra $0.30-$0.40 per gallon is even more rough now that it was in the past.

Have you looked into a new car lately? What kind of car are you looking for? Perhaps I should look at other hybrid options that aren’t just the Prius, even if I am fairly confident on my skills for the Gen 2 version. XD I was lucky to score her at an auto auction back when I got her, but would prefer to go through an actual dealer this time around if possible. My area doesn’t have a lot of Prius within budget, but I suppose something else could work just as well.

Do you have plans for summer travel too? I had plans that slowly had to dissipate due to rising prices in gas, rent, and other things that are really messing with our budget. Hopefully things will balance soon, and we can all get some relief in the end.