There is only one way buying a used car ever makes sense. If you have zero credit, no-one to co-sign with you, thousands of dollars in spending cash, find a perfectly maintained not-damaged low-mileage reliable formerly popular car for 1/10th its original value, and do not depend on getting places in a timely fashion.

I have owned about 7 used cars, so I consider myself an authority on bad decisions when it comes to cars.

There is no way to cheat the gods of autos. If you want a luxury car, you will forever pay luxury prices. If you want a fast car, it will break quickly. If you want an inexpensive car, the only one worth buying will be the one you want the least. Cheap, reliable, sexy: pick two.

Any used car you buy for $1,000 after tax tags & title, and it has no problems, is a good purchase. But don't ever repair it. Use duct tape and WD-40 and change the brakes, but never fix anything on it. When it finally stops running [which will be in 6-12 months] go buy another car. You're still paying less than for a new car.

Here are two fun stories. One about a modified sports car, and another about a used luxury car.

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The 1993 Toyota MR2's chameleon paint job gleamed purple-blue-red-orange as I walked around it to the underside of the engine, next to the trunk. The mechanic showed me where the turbo needed to be mounted up, the oil ring seal that had failed (causing turbo overheat and almost explosion) and the OEM replacement they'd tried to order. Only this turbo (and maybe engine?) wasn't OEM - not for America anyway. Apparently the old part had come from some mystery shipment in Japan and installed by a mystery tuning shop in North Carolina, and the mechanic had no idea what kind of oil seal to replace it with.

Of course, I had another car to drive, because i'm a privileged 20-year-old IT worker with cash to throw away on a ridiculous used purple sports car. So I continued on to work with my other car(s) while I researched where to find a replacement part. Finally I found it - thanks to a very helpful Toyota dealer in Australia - and had it shipped over for a small fortune.

About a month after the initial failure and my little baby was purring like a kitten once more.

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The 2004 Lexus IS300 had what you would call a "colorful history" of parts failures.

Long ago the driver side speakers had stopped working and half the speedometer lights had gone out. It had experienced no less than four water-pump-induced radiator meltdowns, with miraculously no warping of the engine. The left rear speed sensor had been replaced after the shreds of cheap drifting tires wrapped itself around the rear axle and tore the wire away. The entire front left suspension i'd replaced over the course of two weeks (at that time I lived 30 minutes walking from my job, so no biggie) after bumping into a curb.

After the bumper cover was stolen in Baltimore I collected approximately half it's value from insurance and never replaced it. After another curb-bump (due to ice) and parts replaced by a shady mechanic, the left front speed sensor suddenly stopped working, leaving the traction control disabled. The O2 sensors had long since thrown codes requiring their replacement, or possible investigation of the catalytic converter [of which a replacement is $1,000, one forked proprietary chain of three catalytic converts].

But the most pressing problem was more obvious.

The left front headlight had intermittently stopped working some years before in the coldest periods of "Florida winter". It would eventually start working again, so it was ignored until it finally stopped coming on at all; then the headlight that was out would switch places, finally going back to the first. Tried the usual fixes; replace the bulb, nothing. Get a new HID projector (because luxury cars don't come with "stupid old bulbs"; that wouldn't be luxurious), but still nothing. Fuses are all good. Final thought? Electrical problem.

No big deal, right? Could be a mystery wiring problem. New wiring harness cost? $1,000. Well screw going OEM, let's go to a junk yard. Oh... IS300s never come into junk yards, do they? Ah huh... seems the parts are so expensive and rare, people get paid to strip the parts and sell 'em on ebay for near-OEM prices, without a guarantee.

So here I am, finally paid the used car off after 7 years, in quite a state of disrepair, with a value that is thousands of dollars less than the cost of total repair of all the broken bits. All the rest of the problems can be ignored, but the police stop you for a bad headlight. And then there's the safety inspection.

I could have just bought a new car and had half this stuff warrantied, would have been paid off sooner at lower interest rate, and would have been much cheaper to replace had the badge been a large encircled "T" instead of a large encircled "L". Because the same car sold in Japan by Toyota costs thousands less.