How I bought a $100 SUV, sight unseen, and hit the right kind of jackpot

Drinking while shopping on the Internet is never a good idea. Those weird things you would never buy when sober, such as, say, a 20-year-old Ford Explorer stuck in storage for nearly two years? All of a sudden they become your next personal treasure.

Did I need an old SUV built in the Jurassic Park era? Of course I did!

This 1994 Ford Explorer had a few (cough! cough!) issues.

For starters, beyond the dire description, it also had no title. So I wouldn't be able to get it on the road without having to purchase what's called a bonded title. That can cost anywhere from a hundred bucks to many thousands of dollars depending on the value of the vehicle and where you live.

The second big issue was that I knew nothing about this vehicle. Let me rephrase that. For all I knew, this Explorer could have easily had a side of it bashed into kingdom come, or hundreds of rat droppings inside of it. Or even biohazard materials. Vehicles that sit for months can sometimes have unusual surprises inside of them. As a long-time car dealer in metro Atlanta, I once purchased a car from an impound lot auction that had a trunk full of baby snake carcasses.

Still, there's not much of a risk when you're bidding on a $100 SUV that can likely get you at least $400 more by just sending it to be crushed at a local auto recycler. Scrap metal prices are high these days. So since the Explorer was being sold "parts only," I figured a $100 bid would represent nothing more than the fulfillment of my current alcohol-ridden fantasy of bidding $100 for a vehicle I couldn't even afford in my college days.

I woke up the next morning, checked my email, and my first message was.

"Congratulations, Steven Lang! You are the high bidder."