I have recently been fortunate enough to get a pretty hefty pay rise. This is not something that happens often to me, so I really wanted to treat myself. Our family car is great, we have a Mondeo Tdci which is quiet, comfortable, reliable and cheap to run, but I had always hankered after something a little bit more exciting! We only had one car in the family and my wife was often bemoaning the fact that she couldn’t get out and about as much as she would like.

I decided to kill two birds with one stone, and find a new car! I would let my wife have the Mondeo through the week when I was at work, and I would find a sporty little number for getting to work! I knew it sounded like the archetypal mid life crisis, but who cares!

I started to look on a website called Motors.co.uk. This is a great site which lets you choose how you search. There is a big list of parameters and you decide what you want to include in your search. I restricted the search to 100 miles from my post code and indicated I was looking for a coupe with nothing less than a 2.5 litre engine, with a price range of between 5000 and 10,000 pounds.

The results were fantastic! There were so many exciting cars to choose from! In the end I decided to buy a BMW M3 convertible. It was eight years old and had done a few miles, but all the service history was there and I got the car for $8250 – bargain!