car buying aka headache time

I can has Bumblebee?

The hubs and I have been car shopping.

Oh, it's not by choice, mind you. The day I was supposed to go in for my recurrent pregnancy loss testing, my old 2002 Ford Focus ZX5 hatchback died. Not completely died, but the kinda slow warning lights, jerking, grinding gears attitude that singles that death is imminent. Death by transmission failure.

At ten years old and 113,000 miles, my car wasn't exactly ancient, but I had been expecting it to die at any moment. We'd had problems with the Focus for years. It felt like something was going wrong with it every few months.

So it coughed a dying breath on Monday. By Tuesday afternoon, it was sold. Thank you, Craigslist.

Of course, this left us down to one car. We've been lucky enough to have in-laws close by who are letting us borrow a car while we shop. Otherwise, G and I would be stuck in the house 24/7.

But but car shopping is HARD! Our budget is tight. Saving for another baby, paying for expensive RPL testing, and prepping for one or two semester when I can't teach (and therefore have a payment coming in) - all of this freaks me out when we're looking at car prices. And why are cars so expensive?? It warrants double questions marks.

We're hoping to find something by the end of next week, but the thought of spending that much money on an object just makes me cringe. I know it's an investment, something we'll use for at least ten years, and I know that we can drop more money on it as we save. But jeez. Debt. I hate it going backwards into debt instead of paying things down.

On top of everything else we're dealing with, my car had to die. Why, life? Just... seriously?