The one (I never actually owned) that got away
A couple of weeks back me and my fiancé were on our way back home from the in-laws. It an hour long drive and she insisted on driving, which I didn't mind, since that'd mean I'm in charge of music.
About 20 minutes from home she asks if we can switch driver's since she's not feeling well. I tell her to stop on the next exit and as I walk around our car I see an older car with the hood open standing on the side of this small dirt road we're now on. I take a second look at it and see that it's in fact a 4-door Saab 900I.
I tell my fiancé that I'm checking out the car and what's become of the driver. When I get closer I can see that the exterior is in rough shape, although the interior looks nice save for a sleeping bag, a spare wheel and some miscellaneous tools in the back seat. Under the hood there's a set of sockets and a wrench lying on the fender and I can feel that the engine is still quite warm. I take another look inside the cockpit and see that the car isn't locked.
This is when I start to wonder whether the car might have been stolen, so I tell my fiancé who's come to check on me to call the police and ask whether the car is reported as such. As she's speaking with the police I start to investigate the environment and after a couple of minutes I see a man in his early 20's coming toward us on a snowmobile trail.
The man has a towel and swimming trunks over his shoulder and looks a bit misplaced, especially since we're on the side of the highway, pretty much in the middle of nowhere. I walk up to him and ask him if he might be the owner of the Saab. He explains that it is indeed his car and that he parked it there because of the engine was overheating, so he decided to leave the hood open and go for a swim in the meantime. I run over to my fiancé and tell her that the police is no longer needed since I've found the owner.
Then me and the owner start to discuss Saab. He asks if I'm a fan and I confess that a classic Saab 900 is in fact my dream car. He tells me that his actually is for sale, should I be interested. I ask for the price and he tells me that he'd like to get about 17 000 Swedish crowns (about 1760 USD) for it, the exact amount of money I had put aside for Taxes. I confessed that I unfortunately don't have that money to buy a car right now and to my surprise he actually asked how much I WOULD be able to pay for it. I told him that I wouldn't be able to pay more than 6000SEK and he said that it (obviously) wasn't enough, since he had himself had bought it for 4000SEK, and since he had renovated the gearbox, brakes and some other stuff and gotten it through inspection without any issues and so he figured that he wanted to get his money back in addition to some profit, which I thought was fair.
Ever since that moment though, I've been thinking about whether or not I made the right decision. I COULD have saved up the money for taxes again after buying the car and I could've maybe convinced him to go down a bit in price, who knows? Sure, it was a 4-door sedan and not a 3-door hatchback but still... it would've had a hell of a backstory, had I decided to buy it.