more planning.

i really enjoy planning things. today: car and summer vacation. let's start with the summer vacation ...

i was checking out the meals and steals section on a local radio station's website, and found a deal for a white water rafting company - $50 certificates for $25. scott's been wanting to go rafting for a while, and i'd toyed with the idea of fitting it into one of our summer vacations, so i checked out their website. come to find out one of their bases is maybe a half hour from where we're planning on staying for a weekend in july ... interesting. i called to check availability and make sure i could use the certificates for the trip i was looking at, and it's a go! i can use one certificate per person per trip, which would save us $50, so a full day of rafting for two will only cost us about $120 - much better than the $170+ that it would cost normally (which seems to be the going rate - i checked out a few outfitters' websites). anyway, as i was thinking about it, i had the brilliant brainstorm that i can get the whole thing booked without telling scott, and surprise him with it as a late birthday present! i think it's brilliant, and he'll love it, and now i only need to come up with an excuse to get him to leave the house at 7am that morning ... and figure out a plan to pack rafting gear without him getting suspicious. fun fun! (oh, and it is a surprise, so shhh! i feel free to post it here because he never looks at my blog. and if he does, he just ruined his own surprise which is his own darn fault.)

my second fun-with-planning adventure is car related. we talked a little last weekend and sort of planned to just start saving up money to put toward a newer car later this year, and agreed that the price i found on that used forester was a good one. sitting at work this afternoon, though, i meandered over to postnewsautos.com again (online classifieds) and ran a search. last week, the lowest priced 2008s i found were $15,991 with 30-35k miles on them (used rentals); this week, i found 8 2008s with comprable miles priced lower than that, including 4 at $14,995. intriguing, right? i'd like to pay cash if at all possible (we're working our way toward the dave ramsey debt free plan), and between a small bonus scott recently got, some extra money we had saved toward the backyard wall, trade in on erma, and the extra cash from our budget this month, we're probably about halfway there (give or take). which means that we could either borrow half from our emergency fund, or take a small car loan out for half - either way, i don't know that dave ramsey would necessarily approve ... or we could wait until this fall when the 2010s come out, and see what that does to the 2008 prices (and we'd likely be a lot closer to having enough money to buy the car outright at that point). but this seems like such a good deal! even looking at 07s, there are only 2 that are less expensive than that, and the only '06 with reasonable mileage is the same price as these. hmm hmm hmm. i'm seriously tempted, and scott said we could talk about it tonight. (he also said i could get a forester if he can get a 42" flat panel tv, though - which he's been begging for for months, despite the fact that our 6 year old flat screen tv works perfectly fine - so we'll see.) oh, and keep in mind that despite my glowing adoration of the subaru forester, i've never actually driven one, so that might come into play as well.