this wasn't in the plan |but life is still pretty good

Probably not.

In the immediate future, at least.

I had this post planned for Friday, and honestly it would have been a completely different post on that day.  If I were to hold off for a few days, it's probably be different yet again.

Just a refresher, we took our car in for some routine maintenance only to find out that it really needed about $2000 worth of additional work on it.

This is our "family car", the car I drive and drag the kids around town in.  It currently fits our two children quite well.  This summer, after the new baby is born, it will need to fit three carseats.  Which it will just fine, but I'm sure that will get old fast.  Therefore, we were originally planning on replacing the car sometime next year.

But after finding out it needed so much work, we started looking to replace it now.  So now, after much looking and test driving, we know what we want.  But it looks like finding what we want at the price we want to pay will be difficult.  At one point we thought we had it, but it was just barely out of reach.  So now we are leaning towards the original plan.

What changed our minds?  For me, I realized that a big chunk of that $2000 is for new tires.  We know the car needs new tires, we've been planning on getting them.  So really, we can't count that towards what the car "needs".  We were planning on that expense regardless. 

At first, it seemed ridiculous to pay so much to fix a car that we were only going to keep for another 18 months tops.  But now, we're thinking that fixing it, and then saving up some more money for a new car and essentially returning to plan A.  It may not totally make financial sense, but we feel good about it.  Today at least.