I've gotten myself into a bit of a pickle here, and would appreciate any suggestions, tips, or alternatives that my fellow Redditors might be able to offer:
My husband and I have (had?) a 20-year old Nissan Altima, 250k or so miles, but it ran perfectly. We work from home and hardly go anywhere. An old geezer hit us in the grocery store parking lot. His insurer accepted liability and it's been towed to a shop, but book value is probably $1k, so we might be getting a check rather than a repaired vehicle.
So we're sitting at home in our podunk little town with no transportation. No Uber, no local taxi service. Enterprise has a rental place ~15 miles away and may deliver, but we would have no way to return the rental car and then get back home. (Only my husband drives, I haven't fully learned yet.)
Very little in savings at the moment, maybe $1500 to spare. My fault on that one - we're both freelancers, but I decided to take the last year off to pursue artistic interests. Obviously some bad choices at play. I'm back to work now, so we could probably spend more like $4-5k in a few months, but that isn't helping today.
Suggestions? Could we find a safe, working vehicle via Craigslist for $1500 or less? Long-term costs don't really matter - we would likely replace it within the year, or keep it as a backup. Other options? Leasing or financing something more expensive might be possible. Okay credit, tons of student loans, might be some late payments listed, but no non-payments. Working as freelancers might cause some difficulties for approval. Would also prefer to do a lot of research since we know nothing about cars, but there's no time for that right now. And we're going to have to beg a ride from neighbours just to get to a seller.
TLDR: Made stupid choices, husband and I stuck in the boonies without transportation, have maybe $1500 to spare in a bank we can't even get to. Could double or triple the budget in a few months, but there's no Uber and we need transportation yesterday. Advice?
March 10, 2017 at 07:25PM
