Goodbye Old Friend

With Wilson starting a new job (and receiving a new company car) there was just no need to keep this little car around. This car has been with us (or Wilson) quite awhile. I think since 2002! Yikes. Time sure flies by. It's made the trip out to Chicago and back to California. It's seen it's way all over Northern California. For awhile, it was my commuter car to work since it got such great gas mileage (almost 38 mpg!). I even learned how to drive manual on this car. But now that Wilson has the company car and I/we are carrying very precious cargo these days, we decided it was time to see this one go.

It was posted onto craigslist at around 1:30pm a few weeks ago and by 4:30pm, Wilson had already received 12 emails about the car!! We were surprised that so many people would be interested in a 1998 Saturn, with manual transmission and manual everything. And when I say everything, I mean everything. NO power steering, no power locks, no power windows. There's not even a tape player. It's just AM/FM radio with the numbers of the preset stations mostly rubbed off. But it runs well (in fact I was driving it to work when we didn't have a company car) and gets great gas mileage. But it seems as though in this economy, people were looking for a good priced car with great gas mileage. We listed the car according to the blue book value we found online and it was sold for that price.

The first potential buyer we saw tried to haggle with us, giving us her sad story about how she had 4 kids and was starting her own business. Blah, blah, blah. She might have been telling the truth, she might have been playing it up so that we could sell it to her for $200 less than the price we were asking. But in my opinion, you should be willing to pay the full price if the seller keeps saying no. We said no, she walked away. The next buyer came to take a look, actually stated that it was actually a great price for the car and paid the full price in cash. Done deal.

Although I can't say that I am too sad to see this car go, it has been a good car to us. Very reliable and dependable. Got me safely to work and back. Hope you continue to live a long and happy life. And if I happen to see you on the street (the buyer only lives 5 min. from us), I'll give you a little wave.