Car shopping

There is something fundamentally frustrating about car shopping it's a major purchase. A life defining purchase yet it is so easy to approach it with such a cavalier attitude. It's just another material possession, yet its the almost more defining than a home. Key word being almost. A home is where you hang your hat, your sanctuary and oasis. A home is something to utterly personal to be any kind of a public statement or proclamation of individualism.  A car on the the other hand is the face you show the world the public statement of "this is who I am." I am the enigma that drives a flex fuel, hybrid SUV. Or I am the middle aged man stuck in my glory days driving the grey PT Cruiser with purple undercarriage lights and a sound system the rival most concert venues. So what does the car I'm shopping for say about me? I am a poor lower middle class American that would love nothing more than  to be able to purchase outright a 2013 BMW 135is convertible' but the reality of the situation is I don't have fifty thousand dollars t drop on a piece of machinery. I have three, and that's if I don't turn on the lights and eat only rice and beans for a month. So here I a shopping for a sensible Honda civic or accord between 1985 and 2000 with less than a hundred and fifty thousand miles on it, in reasonably good shape and runs like a gem. I hate this.