on being "poor"

Well, first of all compared to many people in the world we are very wealthy. But, especially after visiting the posh neighborhoods of homes in Ft. Lauderdale that have multi-million dollar homes that sit vacant, you do have to remind yourself at least I don't live in a cardboard box. That was all an aside. The real thing I am writing about today is actually the joy of not having a lot of disposable income. This week we had an unfortunate thing happen. The transmission in Brian's truck needs to be rebuilt. Since it has almost 200,000 miles on it we decided to pass and start the search for a "new -to -us" vehicle. Now, we were not shocked that his truck needed this major overhaul. In fact, we'd been starting to talk about what our next vehicle should be, but we were hoping the truck would get us through the end of the school year and we could have the summer to find something right for us.

So, back to being poor. We drove around the local dealerships last night and realized we just cannot afford anything around here. When we got home we were looking at Craig's List for vehicles in the area and on a whim decided to check Terre Haute after we had looked through Lafayette and Indy. Well, we actually found something that we thought, "wow, this is in our price range, and what we are looking for." So, I did a bit more research online and this morning gave the number a call. By noon we were driving to meet the owner half way to Terre Haute and later this week we will be going back to pick it up. We got to meet the guy and his wife and three daughters who all came along too.

Brian, Emily and I got to have a fun road trip on a Saturday afternoon, we got to meet some very cool people, and they were telling us all about the car and how they would miss it so much, yadda, yadda. It even already has a name--Gertie. The wife was saying that you say, "gun it Gertie" when you want her to go fast!

If we had plenty of disposable income we would have researched what kind of car we wanted, test drove a bunch, been picky about color, style, etc. and we certainly would not have driven to Covington (half way to Terre Haute) to buy it.

Oh, by the way--it's a black Toyota 4Runner. We will actually have 2 vehicles that our whole family can fit in. Brian is limited about cars because he is so tall. It's hard to find something his head doesn't hit the roof in. But, since he drives 70 miles a day, he needed something that gets a little better mileage than a large SUV or truck. He really wanted a 4Runner, but even the old ones are fairly pricey. So, we were pleasantly surprised to find this one. It has a lot of miles on it, but apparently not for a Toyota. I was looking at other comparable ones on ebay and some of them had twice as many miles--well over 200,000! So we feel confident that even if he ends up hating it (which I doubt) we will be able to sell it and get our money back.