Tim & Rachel Willie: OUR NEW CAR!!!!

We bought a new car last night!! It was kind of crazy how it happened. We had heard about a sale at a Nissan dealership in Fremont (about 15 miles south of us) but didn't have enough time to make it down there, so we checked out a Nissan dealership locally. They didn't have anything under $8,000 which was our target price. We decided to take a look at the used Toyota dealership afterward, not really expecting to find anything, but kind of hoping that we might. We had a much a better idea of what to expect this time, and had a few specific cars that we were looking for. Prior to leaving we went in and looked up a bunch of Blue Book prices for those cars over several years with some different mileage combinations. As we pulled into the lot there was an Acura SUV (2001 Acura MDX to be exact) sitting there listed at $8,995. We didn't think much of it, and drove around the lot before deciding if we wanted to stop or not. We saw a few used cars that looked like they might be what we were looking for, but weren't quite sure on the prices. I walked around for a few minutes with one of the sales agents, and then decided to go and take a look at the Acura after not really finding too much else that was even remotely interesting. It looked like a very nice car. Leather interior, Moon roof, CD player, faux wood trim, etc. I went and got Rachel, and had her take a look. She didn't really say much about the car (I think she was starting to get pretty fed up with the whole car buying process). We decided to take it for a test drive (it was starting to get on the late side, so we weren't sure we really wanted to take the time). It drove very well. Seemed to have quite a bit of power, even though it has a pretty econimical 6 cylinder in it (supposed to around 23 MPG highway). We got back and called Rachel's sister to get her thoughts and have her Blue Book it for us. It has almost every option availalbe, and the Blue Book value, even with all the miles was $13,585 (click here to see the Blue Book). We started wondering why it was selling for so much below Blue Book. We decided to have them see what they could do in terms of payments. We got a Carfax, and there was only one accident which caused minor front end damage (which had been repaired) and nothing else. We told them that our payments had to be under $200 or we were walking out the door. They came back with the original number, and it was too high. They came back a second time, and it was still too high. They came back the third time, and it was right at $200 so we bought it. Here are a couple of links to some reviews about the car if anyone is interested, and then some pictures of our car.