Cash for Clunkers: I got in before the money ran out

It seems timing really is everything. If I had waited just one more day to join the thousands filing into car dealers across the country looking to cash in on the government's latest attempt to reboot the economy, the Cash for Clunkers program, I might not have scored my rebate.

"There are quite a few people who are qualifying for this program," said Steve Hansen, a car salesman in Watertown, NY where I went to trade in my own clunker on Thursday, at the time not realizing that the program was doomed. So many, in fact, that the government is considering a suspension of the program at midnight Friday to deal with the backlog. As of late Wednesday, nearly 23,000 cars had been purchased through the program, taking a $96 million dollar bite out of the allotted $1 billion in less than a week.