Monday, June 25, 2012

And then the really old car...

... went and died on us. The timing couldn't have been worse, but at least I'm traveling to Brazil in a week, so K will be able to manage with one car.

For full disclosure, K drove the car back home from the mechanic on Friday and decided to use the car to go to the university today and may do it again more times later this week -- though I think it's dangerous and inadvisable.

Bottom line: our Honda Civic is 15 years old and has nearly 335,000 miles on it, I think it's had a long useful life and that it's time for it to go. Right now the cost of the repairs that it needs is simply not worth it. Our mechanic even said that someone might be willing to pay 500 or 1K for it, in spite of the facts that it needs repair.

So, we're looking for a new car (a used Civic, probably), even though we don't have the $ to buy one now. :(

The irony about this is that on the day I received the offer, K spent many hours and was up very late researching cars and he'd decided that what would be best for us would be a Volkswagen Diesel car, probably the Jetta Station Wagon. If we could have waited a year to buy a new car, we could have saved to try to have a good initial payment on a VW, but now that we are forced to buy a car all of a sudden, we'll have to settle for a good and cheap Japanese car instead of the German one.

One thinks is certain, we're buying a used car... we were foolish enough to buy a new Civic back in 1999. It served us well, but never again.

Well, wish us luck!

2 comments:

Libby said...

we just went through the same(ish) thing when our 20-year-old Volvo was sideswiped and the insurance co. totaled it. We had $1500 from them to replace it--which is, of course, not enough to replace a car! We ended up with a used Nissan Versa--fine, but not nearly what we would have bought next year. (BTW, we have a diesel jetta and, while we love the mileage, we don't love the car...mechanical issues all the time! Get a newer one than 2002--I think they have solved some of the problems we have.)

Maria Wegner said...

It’s been almost six months since you got rid of your Civic, so I hope you have a new one already. By the way, 335K of mileage is an impressive feat – many cars don’t live to see that day. I also commend you for considering buying a used car. The market is very good today, so you shouldn’t have too much trouble finding a good used car.