Maintenance cost and buying advice: buy sorted, not cheap

The prevailing advice is to buy a well-sorted, well-documented car and budget roughly $1-2k/year, because a cheap neglected example becomes a horror story with control arms, engine and trans mounts, ignition coils, AC parts and vacuum pumps all wanting attention at 30-plus years. The community adage is that with these cars you buy the service records and prior owners, and the early cars are explicitly not for the faint of heart.