Sorry folks I just reread my post from up above.. I have to stop using my I pad to respond.. The auto correct has a mind of it's own.. Sorry, on a couple sentence's I couldn’t even figure out what I said..
My story is I fell in love with the Retro T- birds about 6-8 years ago.. We saw a beautiful T-Bird blue one with 2,100 miles on it and they were asking $30K for it.. Never seen rain, garage kept. looked brand new and one owner.. Not sure what year it was.. My better half and I both loved it.. BUT we had daughters in college at the time so it just wasn’t in the cards.. I keep my eye out for them and I would see them pop up every so often.. I drove a nice white one over to my wife’s work about 4 years ago.. Again she loved it and so did I. They were asking $21k and it had about 24,000 miles.. I think it was a 2002.. Again it just wasn’t the right time..
So two year ago we had the epiphany that we are not getting any younger and what should we do when we hit retirement.. I had a pop up camper that we had since 1986.. Yes it looked not a year over 1990.. It was in great shape but our daughters have grown and we were ready to move up to a hard sided one with cable dish
A/C and a great idea called a BATHROOM! So we went looking and we saw a few around the $24k -30K mark and as we were looking at them we looked at each other and said what the heck are we buying a camper for.. Let’s find a T-Bird and drive in style to hotels.. So we looked for a low mileage one knowing it was going to be a garage queen.. Again I knew of a white one that a Mercury dealer had all winter with 24k miles and they were asking $19,995.. It was a different one than the one I mentioned above.
So a couple days after the camper show I called the Mercury Dealer which I knew because we bought our Mercury Monterey Minivan from them (it was in late February) a couple years ago and asked if they still had the T-Bird and they said no.. They sold it last week to a couple who lived 200 miles away.. I then went on autotrader.com and saw the 2002 red one we ended up buying that had 16,000 miles and they were also asking 19,995. So we jumped at it,, It was located in a Mercedes Benz Dealership in town.. So I talked them down $800, (big deal they knew they had a sucker on the line) and like I said before, at NYS inspection, they had to put 4 new tires on because the original
OEM tires were still on it and they were dry rotted. They didn’t put the
OEM Michelin Pilots on but I talked then into a set of Continentals..
So we looked at it as out forever toy.. Sure we wish we could of got it for 15K but who cares.. We saved $5-10k not buying the camper that we may only of used 5 times a year.. Instead we bought a wicked cool torch red 2002 t-bird that gives us a thrill every time we drive it.. Being a garage queen that it is, it’s maybe been driven 40 times over the past 2 years.. That equates to about $500 per trip.. Some very expensive trips BUT what the hell, we only go around once and we have worked our butts off over our life time for this one simple pleasure and we are riding in "what we can afford" style..
