I don't know that I did much Monday, but I did get the van sold. Yay! (Thanks to a tip from SA! But I will get to that at the end of my post).

The weekend went really well. I feel like my luck did a complete 180 over the weekend (if not a little sooner).

The Beach Boys concert was a blast. My dad wanted to go (and probably no one else really wanted to) so MH sat it out. I told my dad if he drove, the ticket was his. Really neat venue called the Mountain Winery. Thankfully, the kids enjoyed it. In fact, they were upset we left early. As is, we got home at 1:00 am. I decided it was prudent to beat the crowd on the way out.





My sorta-niece is getting married! I am excited about that. (More happy news!)

I won a $25 Ting credit today. Woohoo!

On Sunday we met up with MH's parents for lunch and then my parents for dinner. In the end, we just winged it at my parent's house. They had some hamburger and we said we would go to the corner store to get hamburger buns. No luck, so we went to Safeway aka the grocery store from hell. As we waited in some crazy insane line to checkout, I told MH, "I would say that I don't miss the Bay Area at all..." It would be easy to presume that this was the result of crazy dense population. But, the truth is our Safeway is the same way. I have no idea why anyone shops there. We stopped shopping there several years ago because it got to be too expensive. We sometimes, once in a blue moon, went there to pick up something or other, but stopped doing that once the lines got totally insane.

Anyway, we chose a line with people who mostly just had a few items. Some employee from the Floral department pulled us out of line and checked us out. I have *no idea* why. We basically ended up cutting ahead of like 100 people (or so it feels like!) It was at this point I feel like I was experiencing some cosmic shift with the universe.

Monday I cleaned out the van. I was out in the front of the house vacuuming it and taking stuff out of it, when MH came out and ended up talking to the neighbors for like 1/2 hour or more. So MH tells me, "Um, neighbor said every home in this development is wired for electric cars." What in the heck!? We bought new construction in 2001. Though I remember a lot of the sales pitch/sales material, I am pretty sure I never heard this. Ever. In fact, we already had an electrician come out and give us a quote. But our big old giant recycle bin was blocking the receptacle and we had no freaking clue!

I have no idea what that means. We tracked it down, but not sure how forward thinking home builder was in 2001. It does look like the wiring is there, but that's about it. (For a minute, we thought maybe there'd already be an outlet! No such luck).

We have another electrician coming out eventually, so maybe we can get a more accurate quote from this one. You know, with the whole, "This wiring was already done and there is a receptacle of some sort already there" thing. It's right by where we were going to put the charger (because it's right by the breaker box and made the most logical sense; probably why the home builder put it there).

Vehicle Sale:

We always keep our vehicles until they are completely run into the ground and/or they are just worthless because they are old and have so many miles. The only exception is when I sold my sports car when I had kids. It was an older model, but immaculate and very low miles. I remember calling around to some of the used car dealer and being offered pennies for it. NO WAY! We sold that car private party for $3,000. The rest of our cars, we donated when they stopped running altogether, or we just traded-in because $500 from dealer was close enough to what we'd get with the hassle of private party selling. KBB is usually around $500 when we sell.

The van? Ugh. We had originally planned to private sale for around $2,000. I mean, depends when we got around to selling it, but private party sale seemed to be the best route in this case, if we did sell it now. Which is what we did (sell it now), but it needs a $800 repair and probably $2,000-ish of body work. We may be able to easily private sale as like a mechanic's special, because overall it is still a nice vehicle. But I just have no idea what we can get for it, and I'd have to get an inspection first, etc. There is also a lot of hassle involved with that and I have a million other things to do. (If I knew I could get $2k, worth the hassle. If I am not sure I can get more than $500? Meh).

If we had bought a local car we may have just traded it in, but didn't really want to drive it 60 miles for a car purchase that was most likely not going to happen.

Then I found the magic solution. I saw on SA the tip to get your car appraised at CarMax and then some(?) dealerships have guaranteed to match that? I decided that we could probably get about $300 scrap for the van and probably could have gotten $500 from the dealer trade-in. So I figured, it wouldn't hurt to try Carmax. If they came back at $250 or something like that, would rather just scrap it. If they came in at $500 I'd be happy with that. If they came in higher, then holy cow why have I not heard of this before?

When googling more about Carmax (wasn't sure initially if they bought such old vehicles) I saw the tip to negotiate on the appraisal value. So, we made an appointment at 7:30pm Monday.

We showed up at 7:30pm and they did a once over. Actually, they called me in the a.m. to confirm appointment and asked some questions. I was very clear about body damage because just want to be as up front as possible. They really could care less about that, which made this so ideal for selling this vehicle. So then you get there and they do a quick once over to be sure they even want to bother with you. I spent about 1-2 hours cleaning the car today because they said in confirmation e-mail and on their website they would pay more if it is in nicer/cleaner condition. I wasn't going to waste any money getting it detailed, and I wasn't going to spend all day on it. But I did clean it up a wee bit.

So anyway, they do the once over. They are interested in the car, so then they take it for a test drive and do a 1/2 hour inspection.

After that they offered us $1,000. NO WAY! I am so grateful for the tip because I highly doubt any used car lot was going to offer us much of anything if we weren't going to buy a car from them. Thinking to my last experience.

This probably means we could have done better selling private party, but I am happy that it's done and I have crossed the biggest chore off of my list.

We tried to negotiate a little more and honestly they seemed open to it. But they pulled up KBB and were kind of like, "Yeah, we are offering double trade-in value. That's all we can really do." Fair enough. Just sharing for one of those, "It never hurts to ask" reminders.

One hour after we got there, we walked out with $1,000 check. So happy to cross that chore off my list!

I am going to apply these funds to the electric car charger. MH ordered one for $420 from Costco (20% off). We should get it in about a week. We have one electrician quote for $350. & I am now thinking we might be able to get that cost down significantly? Anything left over I will put back into savings.