While prepping to lift my 99 I decided to pull off my fender flares and open up the wheel wells and take care of a golf ball sized rust bubble that showed up on my drivers quarter panel next to the taillight. I found that my plastic bumper end cap was held on with hopes and dreams and the passenger side wasn't much better. I also found in the front that where my left foot sits and the passengers left sits the metal is really bad. And my rockers are so so. I've already cut out the bad metal from the drivers quarter and it looks like I did the quarter fold. This is more of a dd than an off-road rig and in the winter I have a 10 mile journey on poorly plowed roads so it's more of a mall crawler so I want it to look nice and have some function. I've priced out all the metal I need and I'm at about 600ish plus ship and maybe one month downtime on the dd while I do this, and probably add 25% to both cause that's how projects seem to go.

Now the actual problem.

With my work schedule and by the time I get all the money together to do this we are closer to winter than fall.

Here are my options;
1. Say screw it lift the XJ and when it rusts beyond drivability it sits as a monument of Jeepery
2. Find a rust free shell 95- which kills need for emissions test and transfer 99 goodies
3. Buy a Grand Cherokee in the 1000 price range cause when I'm done I can steal many parts from it. And scrap/sell the rest.
4. Just keep driving the XJ as is and scratch build a wrangler, it's about the same price as a new one but without stock parts, I've priced it out. And I'd imagine the XJ would last long enough and supply some parts when it met its end.
5. Least desirable, become a normal person(as the parents-in-law says) and finance a newish vehicle even though my XJ has outlasted 3 of them with minimal problems.