Your best bet is to lease a car instead of buying, I guess it works out a little more expensive than repayments but the garage take care of the servicing and registration every year etc.  Also if worse comes to worse and you lose your job you only have to hand the car back and not worry about selling it. Taxi's are unreliable so either buy a cheap second hand car for your wife and lease one for yourself, personally we (my husband and I) both had lease cars, they were only misubishi galants but got us from A-b with no bother and were not majorly expensive per month.