I will try and help a little with my experince....I was 19 once :-)...I am 39 with 3 kids and a great wife and a normal job. We are not wealthy or poor...I would say happily upper middle class...I remember walking out of the movie theatre in 1985 after watching Back to the Future knowing I HAD to have that car...17 years later it is now sitting happily in my garage...I have had the car for just over a year and everything people have written in this thread is true, especially David Teitelbaum. The first car I bought after seeing the movie was.....not a Delorean :-( ...It was a 1988 silver Acura Integra. If you use your imagination and squint your eyes and turn your head sideways etc. I kind of felt it was as close to a Delorean I could get...The car gave me 130,000 mile swith virtually no repairs. I joked with someone once that if Honda made the Delorean there would be no need for a DML. I also remember calling someone in mid 1980s (I dont know who but it may have been Kapac) It was an older gentlemen and he sent me a few photocopies of Delorean information. He spent about 20 minutes on the phone with me and after hanging up he had me convinced not to buy one unless I had extra money and another car to drive everyday. I am very fortunate to have a wife who understood my dream to own this car...Just over a year ago (after about 6 months of begging) she finally said go ahead :-) I looked for about 6 months and test drove 2-3 of them.... I ended up buying one for about $12k and really felt like I got a great deal from an orignal owner who had all his work done at one of the vendors. I am not a mechanic and needed to rely on the skill of others to fix major problems. New distibutor, water pump, steering rack etc...When I bought this car I had no idea what to expect. There is such a mistique to looking at this car that you forget it needs to drive in traffic, at highway speeds and stop when you hit the brakes. These functions we take for granted and like David says the body can make the car look new. Had it not been for people like Michael Pack on the DML who donated about 100 hours of his time when I first bought the car getting it to be safe and reliable (and since we have become great friends). There is a learning curve to this car that you can only begin to climb until you have been towed twice, thrown a socket wrench into your garage door and laid there on the floor with tears in your eyes looking at fuel pouring out of a metal fitting that should never fail. There is a line in the movie "Armageddon" while sitting on top of the shuttle ready for launch where someone says "Do you know we are sitting on 2 million moving parts built by the lowest bidder." In many ways you can apply that to teh Delorean. The bottom line with this car is money. Plain and simple. If you have the resources to fix any problem then buy it now. But I can tell you I had to put out $1500 to pass MD inspection, $1000 for a major tuneup, $1000 in cosmetic parts, and I have a wish list of about $5000 more in parts. Forget about the tools you will want to buy. We tell ourselves just owning the car is enough but then you see all the things on the car that could be a little better. I always put car repairs in 2 categories: what needs to be done to keep the car running and what you would like to be done to make the car look better. It is a constant battle between these 2 forces. People like David Teitlebaum, who has helped me personally, make owning this car a reality. I have also bugged John Hervey on the phone many times. Ther are so many things I want to buy from Rob Grady I could put his kids through college. So from a technical standpoint there is nothing that can happen to this car that can't be fixed, for the most part, the only question to ask is can you afford it?.... I wish you the best becasue I know how you feel...Take your time, join a local Delorean club, meet some owners. If you lived near MD I would love letting you see the car and answer any questions. I was able to get mine because the housing market in my neigborhood doubled and I was able to use a Home Equity loan to finance the whole car....The rest of my car is on Visa :-) And after having this car for a year I would not trade it for anything. A year ago I couldn't tell a sway bar from a connector rod and now my car is on jack stands in the garage and I am cleaning up the frame and replacing stabalizer bushings. I am climbing the learning curve with the help of people on the DML and living the dream. Mike C 2109