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You are here: Home / Homemaking / Family Life / 5 Tips for Buying a Minivan

5 Tips for Buying a Minivan

By Stephanie Leave a Comment

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Disclosure: This post has been sponsored by Cars.com  All opinions are based on my own experiences.  

We recently joined the minivan club! Here are 5 Tips for Buying a Minivan #ad #CarsCom

A few weeks ago it happened. [insert ominous music]

We joined the minivan club!

Ok, so my 39-year-old self isn’t nearly as appalled and embarrassed about owning or driving a minivan as my 20-year-old self would have been.  In fact, I wish we had done it sooner!  My entire family fits comfortably.  We have ample leg room and storage, and it drives like a dream!

The process of purchasing a minivan took us an entire year.  We considered all of our options and have a few tips for getting through the process.

5 Tips for Buying a Minivan

Know Your Budget – Right up front know what you can afford to pay out each month and what that means you can do as a purchase or a lease.  This will dramatically reduce your options on the market and will save you stress and heartache later.

Key Features – What features are most important to you?  We wanted Apple Car Play, onboard navigation, multi-zone heating/cooling, and blindspot sensors.  We used these features to figure out which vehicles would be a good fit for our family and which ones to cross off the list.

Make Lists – My husband and I had a spreadsheet of all of the 2017 minivans and SUVs, regardless of make/model,  that could seat at least 6 and had a third-row.  We used this list to track features, price, miles per gallon, and safety ratings.  Your list can be as detailed as you choose and how works for you.

Start Eliminating Vehicles – First up, cross off every vehicle that is out of your price range.  We then researched the features we wanted on cars.com and highlighted the vehicles on our list that had everything we wanted.

Check Them Out In Person – Since we didn’t want to drive to all of the various dealerships to sit in the cars and see if we liked them in person, we opted to visit the Philadelphia Auto Show.  While we were there, we sat in over 15 vehicles and were able to cross off all but 3 based on how comfortable we were in them.  We checked the leg room in the back seat & third row; leg room & head room for the driver and front passenger; comfort in the driver’s seat for both of us (challenging since we are about 3″ different in height and both need to be comfortable driving).  When it was all said and done, we still had to go for a test drive to confirm our decision, but at least now we had a much shorter list to work with.

Our final decision was a 2017 Ford Transit Connect Wagon.  Our model seats 6, has Apple Car Play, 3-zone heating/cooling, onboard navigation, and blind spot sensors.  It has a bunch of other creature comforts that we love as well which made it a great choice for our family.  

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