Just top update my post (now i'm a little less angry) on my current situation.
My Dad is very VERY impulsive (he never spends any money really, we own our own home and we have a fairly decent wage coming into the house - i'm sure theres lots of money floating around somewhere
) and so the other day he agreed he would pay for my car (up to a grand) and insurance (up to a grand), but I would have to pay for lessons - this sounds great.
Now my Dad ALSO loves to help people, but he just can't stop and then tries to impose his ideas on you, and if you say no he tends to go off in a huff - so he now loves the Ford Ka - If I tell him that tbh narrowing down to one car is quite a silly idea i'll be back where I was before (i.e. in false-promise land).
While we went out to look at a car (a Red 1998 Ford Ka which for a reason not adequately explained had a new engine put in and then only did 200 miles in a year - we never bought it), we stopped off at another garage where my Mum saw a nice Ford Fiesta (new one) which is a diesel - this changed everything.
My Mum currently has a 2001 Proton Wira LXi, 1.5 L. Not a bad car, but it's had some problems - the Tacho works intermitently, and the speedo just had to be replaced for the same reason, it just had to have a new radiator etc and so my Mum thinks as it's worth f. all it's probably a good idea just to get a better car. With this, my Dad says I can have my Mum's old car and he will pay for the insurance as long as it's under £1500. Although i dont like the idea of having something that's being given away because it's so likely to break, theres little I can do about it...
The "stolen money" comment was because when I was around 12 / 13, I was a hard kid to buy stuff for so for every birthday / christmas I was usually given money. I resisted the urge to spend most of it on toys, and my helpful Dad put it in a savings account in his name where he got something like 8% interest (as a pose to the 0.1% my account gave me at the time). I gave him all of my money (On his advice) which at the time was £300 - now that I actually feel I want the money (to put it in my own name in my own high-interest account and so I can spend it on things like driving lessons etc) he's refusing to give it to me as i'm "too irresponsible" and will only let me spend it on things he thinks are good. That would be fine, if he wasn't a massive nub - he somehow finds the bs articles on the internet and believes them, and only them with a slight hint of misunderstanding in there through what I can only think is a hereditary condition (
)