For a while my car buying strat was to buy a new Asian car and run it for 130,000 or more miles. In the pandemic though we had to get my son a car in a hurry so he could drive to work and new and gently used cars were hard to find so we discovered you can always get a pretty cool old car for that kind of money with the expectation that pretty soon you're going to spend about the purchase price in repairs; in our case it was just fine because once he had the job he had the money to pay for repairs himself and it is still a lot less than the payments on a new car.
$4K is about my limit for a car. You can do a lot better than "runs and drives" at that price point, but there's always a chance of getting a dud. Documented maintenance history really helps, but most people don't keep it.
For a while my car buying strat was to buy a new Asian car and run it for 130,000 or more miles. In the pandemic though we had to get my son a car in a hurry so he could drive to work and new and gently used cars were hard to find so we discovered you can always get a pretty cool old car for that kind of money with the expectation that pretty soon you're going to spend about the purchase price in repairs; in our case it was just fine because once he had the job he had the money to pay for repairs himself and it is still a lot less than the payments on a new car.
$4K is about my limit for a car. You can do a lot better than "runs and drives" at that price point, but there's always a chance of getting a dud. Documented maintenance history really helps, but most people don't keep it.