Keep in mind, having had the vaccine, boosted or not, does NOT prevent you from getting COVID, all it does is help your body fight the infection which in turn will (typically) lessen the severity of the case. I strongly recommend indoor masking in public places, regardless of whether you were vaccinated...

Not to thread-jack this conversation, but Carmella, I've got to hand it to you, you're waaaaay more tolerant of the unvaccinated than I am; having had COVID-19 twice, once in very early 2020 before it was officially on our shores, and once about 3-months after my second of three Pfizer vaccines, my...

My youngest started college only about six months into my Chapter 13; that kinda-sorta sucked. Under the "when it rains it pours" category, I had to struggle through my entire Chapter 13 to pay as much of her Undergraduate Degree as possible (in the end she only needed to take out $6,000...

I agree with justbroke, alert your attorney to the settlement and also inform him/her you have absolutely no tolerance for surrendering the money to the Trustee....

Prior to 2009 I did virtually all of the repairs and maintenance on my cars, then I got busy, real busy; since then I've had time to change the oil a dozen or so times, but beyond that, it is better/faster/cheaper to pay someone else to do the work....

I couldn't disagree more strongly. Spending $1,000 on repairs for a car you own free and clear, and maybe $3,000 on the same car next year, is many orders of magnitude less expensive than buying what passes for a "moderately priced" car these days. Said another way, a monthly payment on...

Similar to justbroke, I don't believe the experience has made a meaningful change in who I am and what I'm about. I was a "glass is half-full" guy before financial ruin, and I am still one. I know there are lots of folks out there who ascribe to the power of positive thinking/belief; I am...

I pretty much told anybody; if someone wanted to shame me, I suppose I have plenty of other dirty laundry which is worse.

When a control arm fails at speed it is definitely a bad thing, but not as bad as you imagine. Typically the side of the car still intact maintains more leverage over the direction of the vehicle than the side which failed; the reason for this is the wheel on the side which fails looses it's aspect...

Wow, I cannot think of a more expensive way to have a car at one's disposal....

Ahhh, then one of your control arms or one of the associated joints failed; any mechanic worth his or her salt *should* have caught that pending failure a year or two before it ultimately failed.

Believe it or not, a broken axle has absolutely nothing to do with the control of the vehicle; your steering, brakes, and suspension are all still fully functional, you will simply have no power being transmitted to the wheels (unless the vehicle has a limited slip differential which is typically only...

A few comments:

• I drive a car 1 year newer than your Sentra and am a "car guy"; parts like alternators, starters, A/C compressors are built in mass and are specifically designed to fit multiple years of any given model/engine combination, but also multiple models with the similar or identical

...

I can easily argue both for and against keeping the 2005 Nisan; in it's favor, once repaired, it will be a car which should last another year or two with no car payment.

Working against it is ongoing maintenance; what else is likely to go wrong with the car in the next year or two?
...

Oh, I can think of several cars which would be good reliable rides for $10,000; I have one of them, a 2006 Acura TL which I bought in the middle of my Chapter 13. Well maintained these cars are typically good for 300,000 miles and can be had for under ten grand, often well under; here's one example...

PenFed is short for Pentagon Federal Credit Union: https://www.penfed.org/

Congratulations on the higher scores!

I took a rather different approach to my rebuild than you given I eschewed the AU option in favor of doing it on my own. I started with a $5,000 secured card (which graduated to an unsecured Signature VISA after exactly 6 months) and two unsecured...

Regarding the car replacement thing while in a Chapter 13, I needed to go through it and got stupid lucky; the car I ended up with was 11 years old and had 114,000 miles on it when I bought it for cash in 2017 and it is still going strong with over 175,000 miles on it. Quite honestly, if I was so inclined...

Thanks Zombie13, yeah, the double move thing is annoying, but doable. My main gig when I moved here to the horse farm in 2013 was a Senior IT Analyst doing classic "IT stuff"; this allowed me to get up at "Oh-Dark-Thirty" Monday through Wednesday, take care of the horses, and then...