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03/13/13 - 8:25 a.m.

Bad news. Car broke down. That means more money, but we don't know how much. So today is the day in limbo while we wait for that call from our mechanic...

I don't know why I'm worrying, because technically my girlfriend is supposed to pay for this. Except that means she'll come up short on her part of the credit card payment this month. And she'll be all stressed out, and I'll rush in and say I can cover the rest of the credit card payment (since there's more than enough money on there that I owe, too.) Ultimately I guess it's only a problem if the car repair is more than $480 - because I don't think we have that much money between us, which means the rest would have to go onto the credit card. So that's the worst-case scenario: instead of paying down the balance on the credit card, it actually goes up by a few hundred. And you could tell yourself that that's not a huge problem if we just then pay it down next month.

So the only worst-case scenario is if it costs so much that we can't afford to cover it even with the credit card -- or we decide that it's just not worth it, and we end up looking for a new used car instead. Because that's just a major hassle.

But a hassle we can handle - because we've done it before. (Last time our car broke down, we rented a car, and then scrambled around checking out used cars until we found one we liked.) It's frustrating because we made a lot of repairs to that car, so you'd think that would've bought us more time. It's lasted about two years, though it wasn't cheap to begin with and the repairs were also expensive. (I'd say the cost of the car and the repairs were close to $10,000.)

Unfortunately, there aren't many better options to buying a used car and just expecting that sooner or later it'll need more repairs. For that matter, it's probably cheaper to just repair this car -- even if it costs $1,600 -- because what kind of used car could you buy instead for just $1,600? So that's probably the way we'll go -- which makes me feel better, just because now I have a plan. (And I know we won't have to launch the process of hunting around for yet-another new used car...) I guess we could trade-in the car -- it has a blue book value of something like $3,000, so even with a $1,600 repair there's still $1,400. (I wonder if we could get someone to pay us $1,400 on Craigslist?) I'm not sure what our credit's like these days -- or how fussy those used car dealers are going to be. (That might be worth finding out, because besides financing a car, we could also re-finance the credit card.) The last time I checked was October.

I just Googled our car's symptoms, and apparently the typical causes aren't expensive to repair. So I should probably stop worrying, and just get on with my day.

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