Unexpected Christmas Present

On December 16th, I was leaving work and as I was driving up the hill, my car was hardly moving no matter how much I pressed on the gas.  Luckily it wasn't busy with cars behind me and I pulled off to the side of the road.  The car wouldn't move, so I called Scott and he came and picked me up.  Most likely the transmission died and that is an expensive fix. It wasn't worth it to fix it, so we had a junk yard company come and tow it and we got $300 for it. 

We started looking at cars right away.  We were leaving for California soon and although Scott's car would make it, we didn't want to take it if we could find a new car to take down.  Way before we even needed a new car, we looked at ones we would want to get when the time came.  The Honda CR-V was what we wanted because it was a small SUV giving more space, but not as large.  We went to a dealership first, but they hardly had any CR-V's for us to look at and didn't really do a good job at trying to sell us a car.  We looked on KSL ads every day and decided to expand our search by looking at different types of small SUV's.  

We found this great BMW for about $9,000 from a private seller.  We went to look at it and there really was nothing wrong with the car.  Everything looked pretty fantastic actually.  We ended up saying no to it.  Scott told me that when looking at cars, I need to make sure that I can see myself driving the car.  It has to fit my personality and this BMW just didn't seem to fit.

We kept looking and looking and found another one online that was at a dealership.  We were actually on our way to Wal-Mart to do some shopping when Scott called the dealership and we headed there instead!  We found a 2007 Chrysler Pacifica.  It had about 83,000 miles on it, which worked great with my under 100,000 miles expectation.  The car just seemed to fit us and we took it!  Our budget was $10,000 and we settled on $10,350.  Scott & I don't want to have to make any car payments as I am going to be done teaching and we just don't need that extra bill added on to what we already have.

It is such a blessing how everything worked out.  The car fits us, all our expectations were met and we got it in time to drive it down to California.  This was definitely an unexpected and large Christmas present.  We love it!

Scott put on this cute bow and surprised me with it Christmas day. :)