There are two ways of buying a car. One is wrong. The other is right. I managed to do it both ways in 3 days.

Part 1: The Old Car
When my mother died in late 2007, I inherited her car and sold my own. Hers was a 2001 Cadillac Seville (purchased in 2005) in pretty good condition with very low mileage, as neither Mom nor I did a lot of driving. She went to church, to music club meetings, to the beauty parlor, to the grocery store just a mile away. Later, when she was no longer able to drive, I used her car to take her places, as it was more comfortable for her.

After I moved, I put more miles than before on the car because some of my doctors were farther away, but I’m a homebody, and don’t travel great distances. (My first car had just 6,800 miles on it after 15 years, and that included a lot of 700 round trips when I lived away from home.) The Seville had 48,000 miles on it at age 14, most of those put on it before Mom bought it.

However, I didn’t do well with taking care of the body of the car. I tried to jam it into a tight parking spot one winter, thinking the pile of snow next to it would still leave me room to get out. Not only was there no room, but that pile was frozen into solid ice and bashed in the driver’s door so that I couldn’t get it open. Cadillac tried to sell me a new door (hugely expensive to repair, those cars). I laughed and said just make it work again, leave the dent.

Over the next several years the car got dinged, scraped, and finally took some significant damage. I hit a mailbox, breaking the passenger side mirror and scoring a long dent in that side, so that the back door made a horrible noise when it was opened and closed. Then in 2014 I did a really stupid thing – tried to beat a bus in a construction zone where my lane was getting narrower, and all but destroyed the driver’s side outer mirror when it hit one of those big orange and black barrels.

By that time, new mirrors for a 2001 Cadillac weren’t even available. Try a junkyard, they told me. To hell with that. I found some mirror inserts at Amazon and a friend duct-taped them into place. (I could always find the car in a parking lot after that, even though it was the same color, silver, as at least 60% of all the other cars, by the bright turquoise duct tape on the mirrors.)

I’d been thinking about getting a newer car for some time, especially since I was putting a fair amount of money into service repairs by this time, more than the thing was worth. Just for the hell of it, a couple of weeks ago I put it through AutoTrader.com to see how much I could get for it. Continue reading →