Unexpected Christmas Present

Ok, so remember in my last post how I wondered how everything was going to work out with well.... everything?  One unexpected event lead to one of the pieces of the puzzle coming together.  On Christmas Eve my minivan started making yet another funny sound.  This sound was different though, like a transmission sound, so we took it to the mechanic the Monday after Christmas.  They ended up telling us that it was in fact the transmission and it needed to be rebuilt. So now a decision had to be made, get the van fixed or go ahead and get another van.  Our minivan was worth at max about $1500 and it cost $1000 at least to get the transmission rebuilt. We had plans in February of trading our van in on something bigger, so in our minds it didn't make much sense to put that much money into the van that we were never going to see back, even if we sold it ourselves.  Robb had been telling me that he wanted to get a fairly new E-350 with low miles for $10,000 or less.  I told him that all the vans I had looked at in the past, I had never seen that good of a deal and what he was looking for probably didn't exist.  But we started looking, first in the newspaper (I signed us up for the paper a month or so back) and there it was. It was being sold by a private seller but it was a 2005 Ford E-350 with 40k miles for $10,000.  It was exactly what we were looking for and we never would have saw it if I didn't sign up for the paper.  So by Wednesday afternoon, we had our "new" van and one less thing to worry about.  It is such a beautiful van, I absolutely love it! It fits our whole family and still has 6 seats to spare. :)