Enter Eremos

After Nebo (the used van we checked out in Phoenix), we had to go back to the drawing board. Should we still aim for a Promaster? Should we save to pay cash at an auction? There were so many questions! We thought we should check what kind of payments we would be looking at for a new Promaster before moving onto other prospective vehicles. 

With more research, we decided a 2500 Extended High Roof Promaster would be sufficient for our needs and there was at least one new one available here in Tucson. After the rejection in Phoenix we had taken a weekend off from the vehicle search, but we were too excited to wait for the next weekend. Thomas picked me up from work on that Tuesday and we went straight to the dealership. We didn’t make an appointment, but we were patient while they chose the salesman and he found the keys for the van we wanted to look at. We took the van for a quick test drive then sat down to start talking numbers. 

Applying for Nebo and the subsequent experience left us wary and we were adamant we would leave the dealership that night without a van. We wanted to take time to pray and we told the salesman as much. He wasn’t too happy he wasn’t going to get the sale that night and made it clear he couldn’t guarantee the van would not be sold to someone else before we came back the next day. We were confident that if that were the case, God would pretty obviously be steering us in a different direction. They had taken our basic information and our credit score to provide us with an idea of what financing would look like without actually running our credit. We took that information home and asked for prayers for wisdom. 

The proposed financing seemed agreeable to us and we decided to move forward with the actual application process the next day. We were paired up with a guy in the finance department who was a former pastor’s kid. He assured us he would only be working with up to three banks and would not need to run our credit more than that (the Phoenix dealership ran it seven times!). He was hoping to get a credit union to take us on which is difficult with a van the size we wanted. They consider them commercial vehicles even if they will not be used commercially. Our finance guy had an “in” with a credit union, though, and felt certain that if for some reason the credit union refused, the dealership’s in-house financing would be able to take care of us with a similar offer minus any extras like the gap insurance we wanted. He was so sure, he sent us home with the van before even contacting the banks…

Cut to a weekend fraught with anxiously checking our phones for signs of the banks’ acceptance. We didn’t hear back for almost a week. When we informed them we were planning to bring the van back until they figured things out, they finally brought out an offer. This offer was once again for a higher interest rate and didn’t include the gap insurance. We could not justify taking on the payments with that offer. We wouldn’t have had any funds available to convert the van while paying for it. I was at work when Thomas got the news and boy am I glad it was a slow day. It would have been beyond awkward to have anyone walk in and witness the mess of tears I shed. After the weekend of waiting and hoping, I unwound into grief rather than the relief we were expecting. I cried out to God wondering if I had the wrong idea and vanlifing was not what he wanted for us. I went pretty low before being yanked back up when Thomas got to the dealership to return the van.

Low and behold, they had a better deal for us when Thomas brought the van back. They were finally able to get a credit union to play ball–the interest rate was still raised, but not so much that we couldn’t afford the payments and we got the gap insurance to boot. We decided to name the van Eremos after Mount Eremos where Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount. Not only are we hoping this will be a great stage for our ministry, but Mount Eremos is not really a mountain, it’s more of a hill. Well, Eremos is not a mountain…it’s more of a van. 

We have a lot of work ahead of us to convert Eremos into our tiny home on wheels. We are so excited to see where God will send us.