New Car!

Well as you might have figured out from my meme post, we have a 'new to us' car! Looking for a good used car ended up being a major headache. Our plan was to look for an inexpensive car to act as a transition car (much like our old BMW did) until we can buy something much newer in a couple years. But boy, oh boy. The dealers in the $5000 and under price range left something to be desired. Most wanted way more than the cars were worth and the vast majority had 'dirty' Car Fax reports, cheap and bad body repair work and usually something significantly wrong with the engines. And the private parties were few and far between (or on crack when it came to their asking price - one guy was asking $1000 over excellent blue book for a run of the mill Ford Focus with two missing hub caps!). We kept saying, 'I wish we were in a higher price range'.

After saying that for the hundredth time, we started thinking, if we added in the reimbursement money from the insurance company, what could we get? So for only $1000 more, we got this:

Meet our new 2003 Protege5

We also decided this will not be an interim car. So in the long run that extra $1000 is going to save us a lot more money. We plan to drive this car until it is no longer feasible to do so.

I am exceedingly happy about this purchase. I have wanted one of these cars forever! I love sport wagons and honestly, I really couldn't see myself driving some of the cars we were looking at buying. I was going to because its not that big of a deal and I knew it was going to be for just a couple of years. But this car just feels natural to me. Not too big, but plenty of space for our lifestyle. Just perfect! It also reminds me so much of the wagons my parents drove when we were little kids. So the nostagia factor is huge.

We have an appointment with our mechanic tomorrow to give the car a good once over and let us know of any issues or things we need to watch out for in the future. Other than that, the only thing left to do is get the title. Yup, we have no title. The guy we bought the car from pretty much still owed the same amount on the car note. So he needed our money to pay off the car note. Unfortunately, California is a paperless title state. Which means the DMV prints the title when it receives notification that the loan has been satisfied, then it sends the title to the original owner. Then the title can be transfered to the new owners. Believe me we looked into this with a fine tooth comb and no matter how hinky it sounds, this is how it is done here. So we made sure our money went straight to the loan via electronic wire and we have a signed bill of sale, so everything should be fine. At least that's what I am telling myself. To say I lost a little sleep over this last week before we gave him our money would be an understatement. But I felt a lot better about it during the transaction. We have protected ourselves every way we can think of and ultimately, he probably wants to finalize this sale as much as we do. Would you want to sell someone a used car and not finish the transaction for 2-3 weeks? Yeah, me neither.