I recently had a discussion with my parents about the economic situation here in the US and also about my dads Civil Engineering firm. Apparently they need to drum up some new clients or they may end up in trouble. I'll save the gory details. Something that came up in the course of the discussion was possibly using my ~$5000 in savings for college to pay off a large amount remaining on my '03 Corolla. I forget how much exactly is paid off atm but I know we got it for something like $14k with 18k miles on it.