What you do need is fiscal discipline. Save your money, pay cash. Laugh at the fools who take on debt, screw up their lives and wonder “What happened?”

And especially if you live in CA where the gas is crappy 91 octane for premium.

1. No-load mutual funds let you avoid paying a sales commission on your transactions. No-load funds are shown by advisers who receive compensation otherwise, often by an hourly rate. The companies that offer no-load funds have toll-free phone numbers that you can call for recommendations of what funds to buy.

2. Load mutual funds pay sales commissions to a broker, financial adviser, insurance consultant, and so on. The load, or a portion of it, is paid to the adviser who recommends the mutual fund to you. If your mutual fund has a load, know how much it is and how you pay it. Fund loads/fees should be reviewed by the salesperson and stated in the prospectus (paperwork) sent from the company. Load funds have front-end loads, deferred sales charges, or back end loans:

2A. Front-end loads are fees paid up front.
2B. A deferred sales charge permits the load to be postponed, and it gradually declines over a period of years until the sales charge is 0.
2C. A back-end load means you pay a set fee upon the sale of the mutual fund.

Mutual funds can offer you some great advantages:
1.Money can be taken directly from your bank account each month and transferred into a mutual fund. This makes investing nearly painless.
2.Mutual funds can offer “diversification”. (Diversification is investing your money in different securities in different industries hoping to protect your investment against one or more companies undergoing financial disaster.) If you are “diversified”, and one or more of your investments hits a slump, then you can rely on your other investments to boost your total portfolio. You could, for instance, divide your money among three or four different types of stock funds, ensuring that you’d always have some money invested in a profitable area of the market. Part of diversification is also investing in bonds, as well as different types of stocks. It can be difficult for you to plan that diversification on your own, which is why people look to mutual funds to diversify their portfolios.
3.It doesn’t cost much out-of-pocket to buy mutual fund shares. If you purchase a no-load fund, you do not pay a sales charge buy the fund. “Brokerage” for the investments within the mutual. Fund, or the cost of buying or selling shares of the stocks or bonds, are generally far lower than standard brokerage, because the fund managers buy or sell so many shares of a security at one time and buy and sell frequently. Having this power enables them to negotiate traders for a lot less money than you could on your own. Many people assume that mutual funds do not pay to trade securities, but that’s a false assumption. Fees occur whenever a security is traded; although the fees are usually lower inside a fund, due to the large number of shares traded.
4.The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) oversees the records and expenses of all mutual funds.
5.You can direct almost any amount of money to where you want it. If you’re into a mutual fund for the long haul, you can direct your money to funds that invest more heavily in stocks instead of directing your money to the more conservative bond funds.

If you’re looking for mutual funds that don’t require a lot of money to open or to be contributed to each mouth, consider the following options. They all were given high ratings by “Morningstar Mutual Funds”, a newsletter published twice a month by Morningstar, Inc. in Chicago:
American Funds: 1-800-421-0180 http://www.americanfunds.com
Fidelity Funds: 1-800-Fidelity http://www.fidelity.com
Oakmark Funds:1-800-Oakmark http://www.oakmark.com
T. Rowe Price: 1-800-638-5660 http://www.troweprice.com
Vanguard: 1-877-662-7447 http://www.vanguard.com

One final advantage of mutual funds is that they carry almost no risk of going bankrupt. Due to diversification within a fund, a mutual fund is very unlikely to lose its entire value.
Take a careful look at mutual funds as you begin to think about investing your money. They’re a great place to start investing and are an excellent vehicle in which your money can grow.
If you decide mutual funds are not for you, you can always invest in real estate (if you are wanting long-term investing). You can invest in stocks or bonds also.
Go to your nearest book store and purchase “The Complete Idiot’s Guid To Personal Finance in Your 20s and 30s Third Edition”. It has helped me understand everything about personal finance. The book is a great guide.
(Let Me Know If I Was Of Some Assistance)

Mutual Funds may not be the best choice for you.

In the future, I suggest that you always look up the HISTORY of a used vehicle before you purchase it–we’ve done this for ourselves and our children for 9 years now, before we purchase a used vehicle.. It doesn’t cost much (under $15, if I remember correctly) and it’s really worth it. I can’t recall the website address, but I’m sure you can find it out easily if you talk to enough car-savvy people.

IN FACT, the car’s HISTORY MAY be a way of proving who owned the car when it had an accident and the airbag should have been replaced (although it may be hard to prove this individual did it–but then, how could he NOT know the odometer had been turned back?) Did you ask him questions about the car before you bought it? Did he lie to you? Did he own the car when the odometer was turned back, or was there a prior owner?

But do call legal aid. What this owner did regarding the airbag was horrible–he shouldn’t get away with it!