Many of you know that I recently added a 6th member to my family, pulling my grand total of children up to 4 (no autographs, please). All of my kids still need carseats, so we needed to upgrade our Corolla which comfortably crammed 3 kids in the backseat to some kind of minivan that could handle the smallest member, who ironically needs one of the largest seats.
We eventually found a '95 Plymouth Voyager with right at 200k miles on it that was listed for $1200. The color is purple or maroon depending on your degree colorblindness. It test drove just fine and seemed to be well-maintained. It had only one owner since '95. I usually get used cards checked out by my mechanic before I buy it, but this was over the holidays and we needed something fast. We settled on $800 and I drove away feeling pretty good about the whole thing.
As soon as I could, I took it to the shop to get checked out. It needed all the general maintenance and flushes and tweaks that you'd expect, and it came to about $400. So now I'm $1200 into it and still feeling pretty good.
But wait, there's more. The shop put some leak detection stuff into the oil and found that it was leaking from pretty much everywhere, losing about a half quart a week. I'll be taking it in this week to get some gaskets replaced which will hopefully stop the worst of the leaks, but no promises. That's going to run me about $500. So now I'm $1700 in. Still not terrible, but I hope to God this is going to be the last of my issues for at least a year.
We eventually found a '95 Plymouth Voyager with right at 200k miles on it that was listed for $1200. The color is purple or maroon depending on your degree colorblindness. It test drove just fine and seemed to be well-maintained. It had only one owner since '95. I usually get used cards checked out by my mechanic before I buy it, but this was over the holidays and we needed something fast. We settled on $800 and I drove away feeling pretty good about the whole thing.
As soon as I could, I took it to the shop to get checked out. It needed all the general maintenance and flushes and tweaks that you'd expect, and it came to about $400. So now I'm $1200 into it and still feeling pretty good.
But wait, there's more. The shop put some leak detection stuff into the oil and found that it was leaking from pretty much everywhere, losing about a half quart a week. I'll be taking it in this week to get some gaskets replaced which will hopefully stop the worst of the leaks, but no promises. That's going to run me about $500. So now I'm $1700 in. Still not terrible, but I hope to God this is going to be the last of my issues for at least a year.