Reading the news early in the AM

THIS article made me laugh a bit and nod in agreement. wanted to share it. enjoy.

The specs on the car

The specs & stats:

Vehicle: 2002 Honda CRV
Mileage: 82,000
Color: Navy Blue
Engine- 4 cylinder
Important specs:
-6 disc changer
- power windows/mirrors
- Moon-roof
- folding picnic table doubles as cover for storage/2nd tire area
- folding tray between driver and passenger seat

Other info:
- Automatic transmission
- AWD

Never a dull moment

Last Wednesday, I had my friend Sonny (our mechanic) have a look at our car. The Nissan- see pictures from THIS post. The background is this- we had originally agreed to purchase that car as a 2nd car- the primary was supposed to be our Camry. It was not intended to be the primary car and there were things that, had we known it would be the 2nd car, we would have passed on the car because of.

On top of that, we also had a problem with the car a couple months ago. Back in Feb, we were told by a (most likely) biased mechanic of a dozen things wrong with our car. Having had the car for less than 5 months, we didn’t think that sounded right and took it to the dealership. They basically denied having the ability to foresee any of it, despite the fact that they claimed to have done all the work on it when we bought the car and they would have known what kinds of things would be getting ready to go. They agreed to cover half the work for us because of their reputation, but unfortunately, their reputation was soiled in our minds. Because they knew we were financing the car, they told us that it was only owned by one person (which we found was false), and the car was obviously not in the “great” shape they described- we couldn’t help but feel taken.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago- Rachel and I have been frustrated with the car and cannot believe how much could be going wrong. It sounded like the exhaust was rattling around. So, I agreed with Rachel we could look into the trade-in value of our car and figure out if we could potentially do something else for our vehicle. The trade-in value was much less than we thought it would be, but we were still willing to explore our options- even if we had to eat some of the loan for the car, perhaps we could minimize that. Fast forward to last Wednesday now when Sonny looked at my car. He said he thought he got it, but also told me that it would need to pretty good exhaust work in about a year or so. Add that to the exhaust still rattling. And I’m thinking, “this car is a money pit! If we keep this, we’re going to sink more money into it than the car is worth because it seems like every few months something else is coming up!!” and so with that, we made a decision based on conversations, some prayer and a little research- and when Rachel went to the bank on Friday to ask about what kinds of options they’d have available for us to wrap the old loan from another bank into an auto loan for this one- they actually pre-approved us for the car and can help us with the other loan.

So, I make a call about the car we’d seen a few weeks ago- which I neglected to mention up until now- and they, surprisingly, still had it because they’d been too busy to clean it up. So, on Saturday, we went down, test drove it, looked it over, went to the bank, signed the paperwork and then went back to pick up our “new to us” 2002 Honda CRV. Rachel has been wanting a CRV for 8 years. being a small SUV actually helps our gas mileage because it’s a smaller engine than our car had. And has better emissions than the car because it’s newer and because it’s not as far traveled.

Never again to buy a Nissan. And NEVER again to buy a car from Lancaster Toyota Mazda. Stay tuned for pictures of the beautiful new vehicle, which really IS in great condition- which I know thanks to my carfax report. And which is told to me not by a car salesman, but by someone who has earned our trust. As I say- stay tuned for pictures. And this is really long- so stay tuned as I may have more to say about this later…