I hear ya RawRam2006... I bought a brand new car in 2008 after the tranny in my 96 Intrepid went for the second time. I decided I was done sinking money into a bottomless pit that I could not rely on. Especially when I was going to be driving 800 miles every weekend to come and go from trade school. This left my truck budget smaller than I would like, but hey, we all have choices to make.

So back to the Original Post:

When I picked up my 1997 last fall, I knew it needed some work. Rust,some front end and a real good cleaning. That said, I wound up buying almost every front end part, a rear diff, and a host of other stuff that I did not intend on buying. Its turned into a money pit! Granted I know what I have now, it took a long time, and a fair bit of cash to get here. If I knew it would have been such a bad truck would I have bought it? No... Never...

Just ask yourself a few questions:

1. Do I have to depend on this truck?
2. How much am I willing to spend on repairs a year?
3. If something major breaks on this truck (trans, diff, transfer case, motor) can I do the work or will I be getting a shop to do the work to fix it?
4. Does a monthly payment make more sense than monthly repairs?

For me, I needed a dependable car. End of story. When I do the math though, it pains me. For what I spend in car payment and insurance on the new car every month, I could have a really cool truck and lots of money for gas. That said, I still have 4 years of factory warranty and no worries.

So back to that $1000 truck... Sounds like a gamble. If it were me, I would roll the dice and buy it. If you end up with a lemon, you can still go and beg Grandma for some cash, see the bank or even just go to a dealership and strike a deal for something you like.

If you are gonna get it, run it to a shop as suggested and get it looked at and be ready to pay for that service. They might just save you some cash in the long run!

 

I figure the OP has made his decision by now, but I can't help but chime in here.

If what you've got is just $1000 to spend, you might as well resign yourself to the fact that what you're going to get for it is high mileage and failures waiting to happen. You might shop around for months hoping to catch someone selling way below market, but you have to be diligent because the cherries that hit the market one afternoon are gone before sundown. Most folks run out of patience long before they find that cherry and end up walking past their broken vehicles on the way to work, and would have been much better off just walking past the empty parking space.

In the used truck market, figure on at least 10% of the nationwide average annual family income as a starting point and if that's all you've got it's going to take several weeks (or outrageous good luck) and extreme pickiness to find something that's not a repair bill on wheels. Bump it to 20% and the time required goes down but you still have to be very picky if you're going to avoid repair bills in the immediate future. At these price levels, avoid vehicles that have been extensively modified -- the closer to factory original the better. A truck with a lot of bolt-ons has been rodded and there's a pretty good chance that the guy with the wrenches was only half as smart about it as he should have been.

The best bet if you've got only a grand to spend: Buy some high quality footwear and keep saving while you devote your time to aggressively watching the market. Most of the time, a thousand dollar pickup truck is what hides the oil spot it leaves where you park it while waiting to get up the money for the next repair.