Like us, you probably spend too much time daydreaming about buying cars, playing with various fantasy budgets, and shifting though adverts to work out the best vehicle you can get for that cash.

Maybe that budget is $5,000, $10,000, ορ even $100,000, each of those price points opening up the door to some wildly different machines, but always allowing you scope to pick something that’s fast, or fun to drive, or luxurious.

But what if it was just $1,000? Yeah, a measly grand. Imagine you’ve dropped into planet Earth like some character re-spawning in Grand Theft Auto. Except, instead of just jacking the first supercar that comes along, then pulling off a heist to earn some dough, you’ve got to buy a reliable daily driver with a $1,000 wad you mysteriously find in your pocket.

You’ve got no line of credit so the grand can’t be a downpayment, and you’ve got no tools or money to pay for repairs, so it has to be a fully functioning, road-legal purchase that you could drive across state tomorrow if you needed to, rather than something vaguely cool that “only” needs an entire rebuild. For the purposes of simplicity, we’ll ignore any dealer- or registration-related fees, but presume that you could easily barter even the hardest negotiator down from $1,200.

Related: What’s The Best Top-Down Sports Car For Less Than $10k?

Honda Civic in TN: everything works great, just needs a new engine

On the face of it, this sounds like a crappy scenario to daydream about because it nixes almost all opportunities to buy something that most of us would choose to drive, given the option of something better. But it’s actually really fun, because it forces you to think about cars you wouldn’t normally spend any time getting excited about, if you even thought about them at all. Before you know it you’ll be seriously debating the merits of trash like a battered, but relatively low mileage, 1998 Buick Skylark Custom versus a 2002 Mercury Sable as if you were tossing up whether to buy a Ferrari Testarossa over a Lamborghini Countach.

A look on America’s Autotrader website throws up fewer than 150 cars across the entire nation that fit within our notional $1,000 budget. At this price point though, people are much more likely to be selling via Facebook Marketplace and other platforms, maybe even with a simple card on the noticeboard of their grocery store.

But even having wasted half an afternoon browsing Facebook‘s listings within 300 miles of various major U.S. cities, I found this a tricky exercise. Often, I’d click on something that looked respectable, like the 172,000-mile Honda Civic in Powell, TN, with the peeling hood lacquer and read that “everything works as it should… other than needing a new engine.”

Fairly straight looking Chrysler Town & Country in Modesto, CA

At the outset I wondered whether, to paraphrase a well-known Miata maxim, the answer is always Camry. But I struggled to find many that I’d sink my last grand into, and instead found myself warming to a Nissan Altima near Los Angeles with a dent in the driver’s door and 140,000 miles on the clock. But in the end I pretended to shake on an honest looking Chrysler Town & Country. It looked like a lot of car for  the cash, and I figured I could imaginary sleep on it to save on imaginary rent while I saved up for something better.

How would you spend your fantasy $1,000? Leave a comment and let us know (and we promise we’ll set a sexier challenge next time).