[Dukeboy01]

I am jonesing hard for a 5th gen Camaro. My plan has been to wait until the summer of 2011 when my wife's van will be completely paid off and then buy a Camaro. In the meantime I've opened a dedicated savings account that currently has about $2,000 in it, planning to have at least $10,000 and hopefully more to put down on the Camaro. I was planning to go all out and get a RJT 2SS/ RS, with an MSRP of around $38,000 after I loaded everything I want on it into the Camaro builder.

The thing is, the more of these cars I see on the street, the more I want one sooner rather than later. I am basically 2 years from getting a Camaro at this point. In addition to my wife's van, a 2006 Honda Odyssey, we have a 2003 Chevrolet S-10. The S-10 will be paid off in January and I planned to start making double payments on the van to get it paid off a year early so that I could get the Camaro in 2011. I planned to keep the S-10 on the theory that it's always a good thing to have a pickup truck around.

The thing is that I don't drive the S-10 very much. I have a car (currently a 2005 Maxima) assigned to me from work that I get to drive home, so my daily commute is covered. If I had to, we could really get by with only one personal car as my wife is a stay at home mom and hardly drives her van. It's three years old and only has 24,000 miles.

The S-10 is used even less. It currently has just under 49,000 miles. In fact, I have to make an effort to drive the S-10 around a little every other weekend just to make sure the battery stays charged up. If I keep the S-10 and have a Camaro as well, I'll have to jump the S-10 every time I want to go anywhere in it because I know that I'll drive the Camaro on weekends unless the weather is bad, in which case I'll drive the Odyssey or my work car. That being said, I still like the idea of having a truck in the home fleet. The van can handle most of the things that I need to transport, but a couple of times a year I need to load up a few dirty things in a pickup bed like yard waste or old furniture. I don't do any off- roading, but I like having a 4WD vehicle for the 2 or 3 snowfalls or ice storms we have every year in KY.

So, I'm looking into the idea of going ahead and trading in my S-10 for a 1SS/RS Camaro sooner rather than later. I went by one of the local Chevrolet dealers in town today and it looks like they aren't charging any "market adjustment" crap anymore. I checked on the NADA site and figure my truck is worth around $12,000 - the $3,000 (give or take) that I still owe on it. If I ordered the car in the next couple of weeks, I figure it will still take several months to get the car, in which I will probably get the S-10 paid off anyway. It will depreciate a little more in the interim, but not much.

If I get a 1SS/RS instead of a 2SS/RS, I'm looking at an MSRP of around $35,000. The Edmunds car loan calculator is telling me that I can have it for a monthly payment that is roughly what I'm paying now on the S-10, so it's a wash as far as the monthly budget is concerned. I haven't checked into insurance yet, but I figure that will probably be a wash as well given my clean driving record, married male over 30 years of age, etc.

I haven't brought this up to the wife yet, so the whole thing may get shot down anyway. If I do this, we'll keep making the scheduled payments on the van and pay it off in 2012 instead of 2011. What do you guys think? Should I go ahead a fulfill my Camaro dreams with a 1SS this year by getting rid of my truck or wait until 2011 to get a 2SS and keep the truck? I realize that the longer I wait, the less the truck will be worth, but I'll be saving more money every pay check in my Camaro savings account, so it just means that I'll put more down in cash.