How do you deal with budget creep?

[Tonsko]

That makes good sense.

[BigRuss]

I know that there is the temptation to buy right at the top of your budget, but my advice would be to make sure you've got a bit of spending money left after buying the car.

If you buy on the principle that something will go wrong, or not be quite right, and then you can get it sorted quickly rather than having a car that you can't use until you've done some more saving and end up resenting as it ends up feeling like a broken money-pit.

Just my thoughts

[bobsy]

If 5k wouldn't buy me what I wanted and 7k would, I don't see I'd have a lot of options.

  I'd either spend 7k or wait a bit until I could. If that wasn't likely to happen, I'd seriously look at buying something I might like just as much that wasn't so expensive.

  As has been said, upgrades are expensive, and 2k doesn't go that far even if you do the work yourself once you start on engine, brake or suspension upgrades etc. That's assuming you even want to start getting the spanners out on it.

[Hammy]

I think as shown here, these are kit cars and, as I've found, bits do fall off and they can never be as reliable, dry  or refined as say buying an MX5. Sometimes you will love it many days you will hate it. They are a money pit and IMO can only be a hobby car. A lot of people struggle to do many miles in them in a year as they are impractical. I have no idea why I got one.

A lot of cars have very high claimed BHP and it takes a fair but of work to get 150 from a pinto or 130 from a x/flow, so be sceptical about X/flows with 140-150bhp, it can be done but I'd want to see the large bills.

My story is that I enjoy the tinkering about and  I took a punt and bought a non running x/flow for £3500 about 5+ years ago ( money i could afford to loose).  I got it running and although it only had 115bhp (pro built 1700 x/flow twin webers, modified head, A2 cam) it had a close ratio box and went very well upto about 70 when it started to fade.  It now owes me about £6500 through repairs, mods and upgrading to an XE, but its been fun.(We've done track days together ,got very wet, broken down and so on) !

£7k should get you a very good car (brouse the for sale section), I'd be looking at a standardish 16v engine (1.8? 135 bhp??)independant  rear (ford) suspension wide bodied car for that - maybe one that needs a small bit of fettling but has good build quality and a clean body/chassis. Maybe a very high spec pinto -which can be excellent cars.

As said some of the non Westfield type cars worth a look too.

Good luck!