Patience for Large Purchases

This one comes as being pretty obvious, but patience for large purchases needs mentioning none-the-less. I want to quickly share my experience and reiterate why patience truly can be a financial virtue.

My wife and I love our cars and we have been wanting a couple of "necessary" performance upgrades. I say "necessary" because we are car enthusiast and our newest MazdaSpeed3 turbo has factory limiters on it that steal away all of the performance aspects that make the car what it is.

The instrumental piece of the puzzle is actually a two-piece solution. We want a SRI (short-ram intake) to replace the restrictive factory air-box, as well as a Cobb Access Port V3.

The SRI is the best bang-for-buck investment on any vehicle. They give noticeable performance and substantially increased gas mileage. On top of that, they are washable so rarely need to buy more than one.

The Cobb Access Port allows you to rewrite, or tune your cars computer. You can re-tune for better gas-mileage, better performance, or some mix there of. Too often, people just slap bolt-on products onto their car, but they never actually make the most use of it unless you can retune/remap your cars computer so it knows to take advantage of such add-on parts.

So all in all, these are some price investments. The Access Port alone is in the neighborhood of $750 and a decent SRI starts at $200. You will have to do your research to get what suits you best, BUT, more importantly, you will have to find out how to get the best deal. My wife and I have done the research and found that we could wait for a holiday deal, Black Friday in this case, and get 10% off the total cost, with Free shipping. This got us the products for less than they were selling used for on eBay, but with an OEM and guarantee.

There are many times that I will go the used route, but the Access Port is one that I prefer to have properly functional for a while, in conjunction with a warranty. So if it can be purchased for less than used, while being new, it became a no-brainier.

The moral of the story, 10% doesn't sound like much but on a $950 purchase, a $100 becomes a lot of cha-ching. Happy holidays and I would love to hear the bargains you found by being patient.


-M@

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