» posted on Wednesday, May 9th, 2007 at 04:41 by Spencer
More Trouble
Ahhhhhhhh, cars. I remember now why I like to buy new cars: You start out with a warranty, and you know how well it’s been maintained for its entire life. As I mentioned a few posts ago, I bought a used car to replace the dear late Bessie (the Hyundai Accent we’ve had since before we were married). We bought a Plymouth Breeze that had fewer miles on her, and we knew the previous owner. On top of that, we dropped an extra $850 in repairs on her to make sure she kept running for awhile.
Anyways the battery died. I couldn’t find the damn thing for the life of me, and I hadn’t gotten an owner’s manual with the car. So I looked online and apparently the battery is in the wheel well. Yeah, that’s not a typo–you have to take off the tire and remove a panel to get the most-often-replaced part ever (at least in the desert) out of the damn car. If that weren’t bad enough, when Ijacked it up and removed the tire cover, I found thattwo of the lugnuts were stripped and I couldn’t get the damn tire off. So I picked up a portable jumper and drove it a couple times to try to get me through finals until I had a chance to get it to a mechanic or Discount tire to replace the stripped lugnuts or something.
After my final last Tuesday the engine light came on. I wanted to take a baseball bat to the demonspawn, but couldn’t bring myself to do it after all the cash I had already dropped on it. My student loans are wearing quite thin at this point.
filed under Personal · Rantings · Uncategorized | one Comment
Jacob said:
May 09, 07 at 09:12The worst car we ever had was bought from a neighbor. That thing was a true money pit. I hate buying cars. I don’t do anything without a warranty any more even though that virtually guarantees that I purchase from an actual dealer. Since I hate the whole negotiation component of dealing with dealerships, that means I buy cars from Saturn whenever humanly possible.
Frankly, for all Dave Ramsey hates them, our lease turned out pretty well (he calls them a “fleece”). I think one reason it turned out as well as it did is that we purchased Car Care for the life of the lease so that all maintenance was wrapped into the lease. This made it so I didn’t hesitate to get the maintenance every 3,000 miles. Since it was a Saturn, at the end of the lease, we paid $5,000 for a car that a) was worth $9,000 to a bank (i.e. easy to get a loan for), b) we knew, absolutely, had had all of its maintenance and c) hadn’t been in any accidents…