The First Of Many

Not much to say today except that I got a pleasant surprise. I'd just gone to pay my speeding ticket (groan - what was funny was the place at the police station where they handled it. It was properly like a bank with 15 or so teller windows ready to take your cash!) when I got a message saying that my car was already done! Sweet! So I phoned back and found out that the good news didn't stop there - it was done quick because they'd managed to source the parts locally and from a different supplier and that meant that the cost was R1650, not R3300, i.e. half price! Given that there's a fixed labour charge in there (doesn't change no matter where you get the parts from) I'm amazed at what the difference in price there was for the parts! If I'm going to need to be getting parts from Saab factories rather than using some generic aftermarket parts I think there's another good reason for selling Saabine. I am still very much thinking to do that and getting something a bit more simple. I've been driving someone else's car while they were away in Mozambique and it's an ancient Ford Tracer - essentially an old Mazda badged as Ford. Even though it's definitely not a great car in some ways it felt a lot better to be driving that than a nice Saab. Partly because it wasn't mine, and partly because it was a pretty low value car I just didn't really have any reasons to be anxious about it at all.

So if I do go ahead and sell I'll probably be looking to do a private sale. A trade in is just going to get me ripped off unless I'm forking out a whole lot more cash into a newer car. What would be great is if I could get a reasonable price (R40,000 is not unrealistic) and then downgrade to something at say R30,000 and make a capital gain. Will let you know how it goes!

Oh yeah.... why the title? May it be the first of many unexpected providences that work for me in this situation!