In reply to FatMongo :
Tough to get a refi with no job, I'd say impossible with no job and 1 month residence.
In reply to FatMongo :
Tough to get a refi with no job, I'd say impossible with no job and 1 month residence.
Steve_Jones said:In reply to FatMongo :
Tough to get a refi with no job, I'd say impossible with no job and 1 month residence.
Yeah, I guess there is that.
Refinance also doesn't really solve the problem, it just prolongs it. There's better ways to deal with the mustang. Glad to see the president of my fan club is still sticking around!
The wife was still having really bad cramps this afternoon, and since we've had a miscarriage in the recent past we went back to the hospital. Fortunately mom and the baby are safe, and of course we got another ultrasound. The big black dot is the gestational sack and the tiny little loop inside is the yolk sack. The left side of the yolk sack, between those two yellow markers, is the baby itself! 
In reply to FatMongo :
Horrible plan. Fortunately, he won’t be able to.
At this point he has to fix the mustang... but only a grand to repair, after all the doom and gloom; I’m not seeing that as a real problem
03Panther said:In reply to FatMongo :
Horrible plan. Fortunately, he won’t be able to.
At this point he has to fix the mustang... but only a grand to repair, after all the doom and gloom; I’m not seeing that as a real problem
Assuming that in fact the Mustang is only a grand to fix. He still owes more on it than its worth (EDIT: After looking into it, I realized I was underestimating the value of these early Coyote cars. 11-12's are going for ~18K retail. Crazy to me to pay that much for a decade old Mustang, but these Coyote motors are special). Might as well fix it and drive it as his daily.
Sell the Honda E36 M3box for a couple grand, fix the Mustang, drive the Mustang for a while. It will be more reliable and deppendable than the Honda.
In reply to infinitenexus :
Awesome - prayers for Baby, you and your wife.
In reply to infinitenexus :
BTW, super glad to hear everyone in healthy. In the end, that’s truly the only important part!
In reply to 03Panther :
Totally agree. This has been especially hard on my wife. Her hormones are raging due to her pregnancy so she gets stressed easily. I'm doing my best to keep things peaceful for her. So today is a day for positivity! We had an ugly old dead tree right in front of the house so I'm cutting that down (with a small hand saw, plenty of work) and burning it. And there's cars racing out at Sebring and we can hear them from our front door step, which is awesome.
infinitenexus said:I called the nearest dealership to get a quote on fixing it, and he said $930 in labor plus parts. Yikes. The other nearby mechanics are closed so I'll have to wait until Monday to check.
That sounds like (potentially) REALLY good news! As others noted, much less $$$ than going through repo.
Just made an appointment to drop off the mustang to get fixed. Wednesday first thing in the morning I'm taking it in. I know paying that bill is going to suck, but as several of you have said, it'll be better than dealing with a repossession
infinitenexus said:Just made an appointment to drop off the mustang to get fixed. Wednesday first thing in the morning I'm taking it in. I know paying that bill is going to suck, but as several of you have said, it'll be better than dealing with a repossession
What's your plan after it's fixed? Sell it? Do you think it will sell for at least what you owe on it?
dyintorace (Forum Supporter) said:infinitenexus said:Just made an appointment to drop off the mustang to get fixed. Wednesday first thing in the morning I'm taking it in. I know paying that bill is going to suck, but as several of you have said, it'll be better than dealing with a repossession
What's your plan after it's fixed? Sell it? Do you think it will sell for at least what you owe on it?
My thought would be that when the Maryland money arrives, use a bunch of that cash influx to offload the car. Since you owe more than it's worth from having refi'ed it once and taking out some cash, you'll need to make up the difference.
I don't remember the exact numbers but if you owe $16k and you can get someone to pay $14k for it then at the time of the sale, you are going to need to have $2k in cash to pay off the car loan so the new guy can get the title from your lender.
Coyote Mustangs are down in the $12-14k range now?
In reply to yupididit :
When searching for manual trans GTs, the only one that I see in that price range on Autotrader is basically $13k with 120k miles. They're far more common in the $15-18k range.
For OP, once the car is fixed, I'd be pretty tempted to try a private sale before selling it to a dealer or Carmax, etc.
CarMax has a bunch of lower mile 12/13 GTs in the low 20s. Heck, they have a '13 V6 Auto w/65k miles at $17k. If the car is clean it might work out OK.
By observation but not personal experience, private sale of an out-of-warranty car for mid-teens is a real headache. There's something about that price point. The kind of buyer who can pay cash or secure financing has a huge number of options. When my neighbor tried to sell a minty Mustang vert for (coincidentally) $16k, all he got was tire kickers who couldn't come up with the money. And the description of the current living situation is not going to make potential buyers super confident.
In reply to mfennell :
I've gotten to the point where I won't meet a buyer at my home if I can at all help it. Police office parking is a great place for meeting buyers and becoming more common and sidesteps the judgements of living accommodation.
Having a toddler, a baby, and an sn95 mustang... While you want to say it's got a back seat and can do daddy duty... They don't work well for it. Even the newer ones will still be a royal pain in the car seat department. I couldn't find a toddler sized rear facing seat that would work. At least not that you could actually get the kid into, so you have a gap where you are out of the removable seat and still legally need to rear face... Even with forward facing, I had my expedition down for maintenance and had to daddy duty with the mustang for a week or two and I just removed the passenger seat to have easier access. Sell it, with payments it's a wound to stop bleeding from and worth getting life simpler before baby sleep deprivation becomes your life for awhile.
General dad advice (separate from your situation) is you really really want 4 doors for the first few years, I just punted for a tow pig for my daily, but many sporty 4 doors exist now at cheaper price points.
Btw a huge money saving tip for new parents. Make friends with parents of older kids. We had to buy very little because of people thrilled to just offload old kids stuff rather than sell or donate it. Likely over a thousand bucks worth of stuff. (Not just clothes; toys, bassinets, crib, all the things) If you have to buy, buy as little new as possible. (Thrift shops!!!) Tiny kids will only wear the clothes for a few months before outgrowing them anyways. Unfortunately, my wife's friend has dibs on our hand-me-downs and we are in Maryland. Network! it will save you TONS. Wife and I make good money, we still roll up to the thrift/2nd hand shops for kids stuff, you will pay a small fraction as much.
In reply to Apexcarver :
Thanks for the tips! We're definitely going to be Prius drivers for a good long while. My wife loves hers, and it's great for having a baby.
We've been carefully looking around and have gotten some fantastic deals on baby stuff from Facebook marketplace. We got a small crib for free, a dresser with a changing table on top for $10, and we're picking up one pack of diapers and one pack of wipes per paycheck. The local goodwill has a massive baby section and all the baby clothes are $1 each so we have a nice pile of those.
Also, I've been studying the google IT certification course for I think 3 days now, and I'm on week 6 of the course. That'll help me enter the IT field.
In reply to Apexcarver :
Agree 100% with making friends with people with older kids. A couple years ago since friends of ours were expecting somewhat unexpectedly and we let them have pretty much whatever they wanted from our storage locker. And I think both parties thought they were getting the better end of the deal! Way too much work to try to sell it all, it needed to be cleared out to make room for tools, and they came and carried it out of there for us.
In reply to wae :
I had one friend deliver two minivan loads! The universal thing I hear is happiness at getting space back.
As far as diapers... Try the cheap brands when baby is here and see what works. We landed on target brand
infinitenexus said:In reply to Apexcarver :
we're picking up one pack of diapers and one pack of wipes per paycheck.
A few is fine, but don't get carried away here. Babies are different sizes, and different brands fit differently too. We had tons of blowouts until we found the right fitting diaper. You also may find that kiddo has sensitive skin and needs a particular brand of diaper or wipe or cream or whatever. We had a family member generously give us a couple of boxes of large diapers. At the time we thought, "Great! Thanks! Anything for baby is good." but reality is that my kid is going to be fully potty trained before she's big enough for them to fit and we'll probably end up giving them away after storing them for 3 years. Point being, that you don't want to have a stockpile of baby stuff that you can't or won't use. Liquid cash that can be spent on the spot is better than a stockpile of stuff that won't be used and just gets unloaded at a loss eventually. Save the money and space for things that will actually be used, and you might not know what those are ahead of time even if you think you do.
In reply to STM317 :
That's a really good point. I ran it over with the wife - instead of buying diapers and wipes, we'll just set a few bucks aside each paycheck specifically for those.
also I have a cousin that lives in Gainesville and she's been telling me all about it. She really makes it sound like a great place. After talking with her, we'll probably set our sights for there, for our move in (hopefully) a few months.
We knew we were going to have more than one kid, so we went the cloth diaper route. We estimated that it saved about $400 for the first kid, and probably $1200 for each subsequent kid. Amazon has the best price on diapers, somewhere around $.20 per diaper for the bigger sizes (that's the only one I know off the top of my head as my twins are 3). That cost has been about the same for all 5 of my kids over the past decade, so yeah, not too much advantage to stocking up now. Pocket the cash.
The chain "once upon a child" is awesome for cheap kids clothes. Like others have said, we're in a pretty comfortable income bracket, but most of our clothes have come from there or friends.
I know you guys are just settling into sustenance living for the near future, so one of the most practical recommendations for now (and hopefully later) is just taking care of necessities, as in, planning for meals and such so you're not overspending on the basics when you get to the grocery store. A handy tip if you haven't used this before on Android (I'm sure IOS has something similar?) is to use the "Google Keep - Notes and Lists" app to keep track of groceries, todos around the house, etc. You can create a list and share it with someone, so we have lists for groceries, costco, hardware store, etc. When you run low on something, immediately add it to your list to pick up next time it's on sale, or if you're meal planning your week (which you should be doing to capitalize on sales & coupons), you already have a list made of what you need when you get to the store. That'll help prevent bill creep as you grab something because, "I think we're out of..."
In reply to WonkoTheSane (FS) :
Thanks for the tip on once upon a child. I'll check them out. My wife also has expressed a lot of interest in cloth diapers. Fortunately I'm pretty handy in the kitchen, so we've been able to keep our grocery bill in check. And there's an Aldi nearby so things like mustard and salad dressing are dirt cheap.
In reply to infinitenexus :
I remember a few years back, we were very happy with the Aldi brand diapers. My favorite thing about them was that you didn't have to by the 144 diaper count box to still get a good price per diaper. Nothing worse than buying the 144 count box only to realize you need the next bigger size and still have 60 of the wrong size left.
Car tip for parents: Even w/one kid a minivan with a power sliding door will make everything easier 10x easier. You'll notice the difference even more when you get to toddler age. We're on our second 2008 Honda Odyssey. Almost all of them are in the $4k to $6k range these days (make sure timing belt was done).
If you're thinking about selling through a dealer try the regular routes (carvana)...but also try KBB offer route. Both dealers I spoke to after I received the KBB offer said that was just a minimum...both indicated based on my car and the market they could pay $2k - $3k higher. Check all the local dealer listings within a few hundred miles to see what they'd expect to sell your car for and work backwards from there to figure out what a reasonable offer would be.
I actively look for people to give old clothes to...that gets easier once kiddo is in daycare preschool, etc. It's always fun when you recognize a friend's kid wearing an old t-shirt or something you gave them.
I haven't spent much time in Gainesville, other than passing through for snorkeling in the springs or fishing/camping. It's a college town and very bicycle-centric. It's kind of spread out, lots of strip malls and traffic lights. Some neat/cool older neighborhoods & pretty easy to get into the wilderness.
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