Lucky Break!

[sheepdog 10]

Well, for once we had a stroke of good luck, that sure doesn't seem to happen very often.For quite some time now we have been sweating on what we would do when the old Ford Aspire bit the dust. We knew that the day would be comming soon, as it has just about 260,000 miles on it! Thats a lot of miles for a little car. And they have been hard miles, we actually use our cars, we haul feed, water to the goats at the other farm, and pull a small trailer with the car. We have had on numerous occasions 1/2 a ton or more of feed in the car and/or on the trailer behind it. Finances being what they are here, we figured we would be in big trouble when it died. I had tried once to get a loan and had failed. (not bad credit, just no credit, we usually pay cash) We checked with some of those buy here pay here places, and lordy what a rip off those dumps are! They charge you 3 times what the car is actually worth to start with. The other day my better half was at the lumber yard talking with a buddy of his that worked there, they got onto the subject of sending junk cars to the crusher (a hot topic here in recent months with the high price of scrap metal) His buddy mentioned having some kind of a little car that his kids had just been playing around with driving it out in the fields. After questioning him more about it, turns out it's a Ford Festiva, which is the model that came out before the Aspire. One of those little cracker box cars, that gets that wonderful 40 mpg! Hubby asked him to price it, he did and he bought it on the spot and didn't even try to jew him on the price! That was site unseen! As it turns out, the car is in REALLY good shape. Though it is older than our Aspire, it has only half as many miles on it, a mere 130,000! It was missing one back window, which a quick trip to the salvage yard fixed, and has some body damage on the passenger side. However, it runs great and had nearly three quarters of a tank of gas in it, and 4 nearly brand new tires! We are very very happy about it. And the price? A mere $250!!!!!! The tires and gas were worth nearly that much! Heck, lots of people make a single months car payment that is higher than that! So, it looks like we will still have wheels now!

[jlhaslip 4]

Excellent deal for the car. With the price of gas going straight up, there will likely be lots of people downsizing their vehicles.Are you going to keep the Aspire to haul feed with? Save some wear and tear on the Festiva? Wonder if the Salvage yard can do anything about those passenger side dents?

[Plenoptic 0]

That is a great deal, especially seeing as it has half the miles and gets good gas mileage. Any car around here that would be $250 probably would not run and would take more to fix than buying a good used car. Sometimes it is good to be friendly and to get to know someone because that is how deals are generally made.

[sheepdog 10]

And it just keeps getting better!We have been driving it all over the place, put lots and lots of miles on it this week allready, and we wanted to go pick up some garden seed last night and hubby was getting worried that maybe the gas gauge didn't work since it showed that it still had a quarter tank after all our running around. So we stopped for a fill up and it held less than 7 gallons! We figured it up and best we could add up our trips it looks like the little dude gets about 47 miles per gallon!!! We figured out if we had to drive our son's pick up instead of the little car, the difference in gas would pay for the car in less than 2 months! At some point we may try to do some body work on it, but that is one of "those" projects, we have hundreds of those, "one of these day's we will fix-build-repair-make-redo this." We have a "new" kennel building that we have been trying to build for almost 15 years now! Since we are just as likely to drive it in the woods and fields, as to drive it to town, perfection in looks of it are just not real high on the pryority list. We really aren't into the keeping up with the Jone's mind set that you have to have a shiny new car to show how well off you are. Getting from point A to point B as effectivly as possible is a lot more important. We will definatly keep the Aspire, maybe even splurge for a new set of tires for it when we get ahead. We both do a lot of running and really need 2 cars.