You may find out! Yesterday I was concerned about the fact that my oven doesn't work any more. Today we had a 9 AM appointment to do a walk through at the house we are buying. On the way I noticed that the car is running a bit rough. I took it to th edealers because no one else had time to look at it today and I had a 3 hour drive to make tomorrow. It seems that my engine needs to be replaced. A new one is almost 4000.00!!! I dont' know anyone who rebuilds engines. I called my husband at work and told him I needed him to come over so we could figure out what to do. We decided on three choices. Thake the thing home and park it and drive the car which would need 4 new tires and a brake job in order to have us use it full time. (we pay it off in 2 months and were planning on selling or donating it since the new house is within a mile of work.) That choice would mean we rented a car anytime we took a long trip East to see kids since the car has 107,000 miles on it. Choice 2 is trade it in and buy another van since we need the space. Choice 3 is use a credit card to have th ecar repaired. Neither of us liked choice 3, choice 1 concerned us since we would still have to pay payments and insurance on the van as it sat in th edriveway and we weren't sure when we would be able to have it fixed. So we decided to explore choice 2. We talked to the dealer where we bought it and he offered us 4000 dollars as a trade in. We owe 9500. That didnt' work for either of us especially since we couldn't finance the difference along with the price of the van we were looking at. At another dealer they offered us 7500 for the van after finding out the extent of its problems. They also told us what happened, seems there is a gasket that rots and lets fluid into places it shoudn't be which then destroys some sort of rod an dbearing or something like that. We agreed on a van and then saw the price. My DH said if they'd drop the price 4000 we'd buy it. They cringed and offered (40 minutes later) 1500 off and DH said yes. Hours later I was wondering what was taking so long and getting very nervous since I had 11 people coming over for dinner in a couple hours. They finally told us that the financing problems were because the company didn't want to finance the car for that amount with the extra from the last loan. I was releived since I was afraid our credit had gotton messed up somehow. Anyway they had to give us a 11500 trade in allowance, 2000 more than we owed!!!Our payments will be higher but not as high as we thought. God is so good. Not only that I got home in time to have company although I admit we had pizza instead of the dinner I had planned. They had fun and the kids made "gingerbread houses" out of graham crackers after dinner. my 3 year old was in the car dealers from 1130 am to 444 Pm. He was more patient abou tth ewhole thing than I was! Of course he wasn't too concerned about the company coming!!! All in all an interesting day but I guess we are ahead slightly. At least we didn't have to rent a car for out trip tomorrow.