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I drove disposable vehicles. <$1000. Drove them for a few years, then threw them away. I did that out of high school. Then I finally bought a "nice" car. Blew the motor after paying on it for a year. Made the next two years of payments with the car sitting in the yard. Vowed to never do that again. So for the next decade, I went back to disposable cars again. Then I got a bug to spend a little extra on my next car. I had a Ford Probe stick once and it was a solid car. (I drove it though a flooded street and that is how that car met it's demise.) I liked those little stick shift cars, so I went through cars dot com looking for a little stick shift.
Finally decided on a year old Cobalt. Went to take it for a test drive and discovered I did not have my driver's license. I don't know how how long I had been driving thinking my state ID was my license or what happened to it in the first place, but I was sent home.
The next day I was bored at work and I opened up the year parameter on the website and spotted an Audi TT with 100k miles on it. It looked neat. I didn't have too many friends anyway so a back seat was just a place for my empty McDonald's bags. I scrolled down further and found two 1997 986s. I did some basic research on them (never heard of the bearing issue, thankfully or I would have moved on). Then I asked my friends at work, "Why should I not buy this car?" Then I moved on to anybody I could find trying to get someone to talk me out of it. After two weeks, and the only issue anybody could come up with was repairs are expensive, I went to visit one of the cars. I think everybody knows what happened next. I fell in love. Even the test drive seemed like a waste of time that I could be using to make this car mine.
In retrospect, I should have pressed on getting the wind screen that he had "somewhere" in his garage. I also probably could have knocked 500-1000 off the price. Other than that, I was very lucky and very happy with my little stick shift.
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