Thanks for getting me there and back.

I sold my car three hours after putting on craigslist. It is said that craigslist is responsible for destroying newspapers through their loss of ad revenue. You just cannot get that kind of response time from the printed word. So while I still have my copy of the last PI along with the last copy of Detroit’s Orbit magazine, I also have a hand full of one-hundred dollar bills.

Gone is the first car my wife and I bought together when I was stationed in Southern California what seems like a life time ago. Gone is the car that took us over the mountains, down into the Anza-Borrego desert. Gone is the car that took us the length of the 5 from border to border. Gone is the car that took us up and into the Olympic and Cascade Mountains, down forrest service roads that were never meant for such commuting.

I hated that car. It was the ugliest car I’ve owned, and I always wanted something more aesthetically pleasing, something more chic, a Jetta perhaps. But that target market has since passed me by. The Camry was by far the most reliable car I have ever owned. I put a hundred thousand miles on it in the six years we owned it for a total of 180-something. I am convinced there will easily be a hundred thousand more. It’s too bad I couldn’t have seen her through to two-hundred-thousand, but onward to better things. Onward toward an enhanced driver license with motorcycle endorsement, a Triumph Thruxton, and a five dollar commute.

Welcome to Middle Class: Getting By on Two Cars

I start my new job on the first of the month and with it, twenty years of commuting sixty miles a day. For the past five years we’ve gotten by on one car. However I’ll be at the academy for four and a half months and neither one of us can go without a car durring that time, and for the most part from here on out. Since I’ve gotten out of debt and paid my car off a year early I am really weary of having a car payment again.

We set out to find a used car between five and eight years old. Specifically we were looking at Passats, Camrys, and Accuras. Ideally we were looking for a car with one ownerwho didn’t smoke with around 75,000 miles on it. With a one month time line of buying a car our exaustive search began with a thirty dollar subscription to Carfax. I cannot stress how valuable this service was. When you already know what you are looking for Carfax helped sort out the cars with salvaged titles, accidents, fraudulent odomoeter readings, and previous rental cars.

With our sights set on the passat we found the perfect car. An ‘02 being sold by a firefighter in emaculate condition with records of all regular schedualed maintenance.  To me records of maintenance are more important than low milage.  Newly listed I called and thought for sure I was in.  The next day I recieved an email sadly informing me that it was sold.  

A week later I found another Passat with low miles at a dealer 35 miles away.  After calling to verify the car was still in stock we fought rush hour traffic downtown to find that that particular car had been sold three days earlier.  Thank you Toyota of Seattle though your employees have the contemporary hipster look down they still could learn  few things on customer service.  The next day we found another Passat wagon with high miles from an avid bicylist who again kept the car in emaculate conditions and had kept all of the records of maintence.  Scared by the milage despite everything else I started to heed the consumer reports suggesting that Volkswagons are expensive to maintain, and might not behave as well as my ‘97 which I had just put 170,000 miles on.  Sixty of which belong to Toyota of Seattle.  At $3.339 a gallon I would like to again thank Toyota of Seattle I’m sure I would have wasted that ten bucks somewhere else.

Advice that potentialy saved me thousands

When I  paid off my Toyota Camry, that I bought used and recently had a few thousand dollars worth of work put into it to ensure me that it would last beyond my goal of 300,000 miles. So when my Check Engine light came on I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I got it fixed. The car was still running the same, and previously I had paid my mechanic to fix the problem which usually resulted in a faulty O2 sensor. Luckily my mechanic was booked that weekend. When I came home a google search for “My check engine light came on, Toyota Camry” brought me across Seve Olson’s blog.
Following his advice and finding it to be most relevant to my situation, my problem was diagnosed and fixed within thirty minutes at the low cost of zero dollars.