The $100 car

In my post below I alluded to dh's $100 car. When I met him 11 years ago, he was driving a Chevy Corsica missing all its hubcaps. He'd purchased it from a junk yard, swapped out a few parts and had a running car he could afford. His finances were very, very tight in those days. A few months after we married, something went wrong with the car and he gathered his resources and had it fixed. Literally on the way home from the repair shop, the car threw a rod. I don't actually know what that means, but I do know it is a catastrophic problem and the engine was toast. What to do? Work was over ten miles away and he had no car. I had $100 and told him he could have it if he could get a car for that. He was pretty determined because he had to have transportation, so we went into Twin Falls to look. After a bit of looking at a couple of places, he came around to the passenger side window and asked me if I really did have the $100 on me because he had found a $100 car.

And what a car it was! It was a dented 1988 Pontiac J100, a big four-door sedan with an overflowing ashtray. It smelled like death with all those cigarette butts spilling out of the tray. It needed a water pump and all the tires were flat. He ended up paying $114 with the tax and whatever else the dealer tacked on, then we took my car over to Napa Auto to get the water pump. Dh changed out the water pump right there in the used car dealer's parking lot, then took the tires off the car, put them in my van and took them down to a gas station to pump them up. He reinstalled them and drove his "new" car home.

In a few months finances were a tad better and he found another car and sold the $100 car for $500. My grandmother always liked this story because it told her just how resourceful my dh was and is.

By the way, my brother is still driving my grandmother's '83 Buick she left him when she died seven years ago.