The only
bright side of this anti mustachian post is that I paid cash for my BMW, a used silver 2003 330ci. Man was that car sweet! It had black leather interior, 5 speed transmission, and the previous owner had installed a huge 12" sub-woofer in the trunk. This thing could really bump when I wanted it to. I also got an amazing deal on it. I found it through a local add, for sale by owner, who was being deployed over to Germany and couldn't take it with him. He was asking $12k, I knew it was a long shot, but I only had around $10k in savings at the time, I offered him $9k cash and the deal was done.
Now the
downside... I bought the car with around 89k miles on it, and sure enough, after just a couple months of ownership I had a huge repair bill, around $1k! By the time I ended up selling the car, 2.5 years later, after moving to Seattle and no longer needing it I had spent over $5k in maintenance! Holy cow. Thanks to the sweet deal I got when I bought the car, I was able to sell it with 25k additional miles for the same price I bought it.
Let's just say lesson learned. I'm now happily riding the bus while focusing on saving up for a wedding and finishing paying off my student loans. Here's a description of my journey
http://jlyblog.wordpress.com/2013/09/10/goal-1/