Someone talk me out of this

Dave, you should totally buy that. Awesome find.

It's a nice BMW wagon with over 200K miles.  Of course it's gonna need work in the future...but dropping in a lower mile motor is easy compared to finding another wagon with a stick in that nice of condition.

My DD is a 2000 528iT 5-Speed with a 3.0 liter swapped in. Incredibly comfortable, incredibly smooth, gets decent fuel economy (25ish), and hauls a ton of stuff. I've been driving my 1990 Range Rover for the past two weeks because the pedal position sensor in the BMW died and I can't afford to replace it. I paid $4k for mine and have around $11k or $12k in parts into in the past two years.
That being said, a lot of that was replacing the engine because I was out of town so let a mechanic at a BMW shop fix a battery connector for me. As a "favor" he replaced the support bushings for the radiator. He forgot to bleed to coolant system, so it got an air bubble and blew the head gasket.
They're not fast, or even close to fast, in stock form. It was a dog as a 528. As a 530 it's pretty fun. I hate to say it this way, but: Buy it, you'll love it. However, accept that it's a disposable car that will be dead in a couple of years. And when it dies, sell me the seats and steering wheel because mine isn't an M-package car.
It will have electrical problems that seem maddening but aren't that bad. For example, when I went to leave work once, I unlocked it, which for some reason turned the hazard lights on. Nothing I did would turn them off, so I went to figure out which fuse to pull to turn them off. During this time, the radio turned off by itself. I restarted the car, the radio was still dead, but the hazards turned off. Fine... good enough to drive it. Then I realized the radio would only turn on when the turn signals were on. Except the turn signal indicator on the dash no longer worked. It was quite the cascade. The solution? Disconnect the cable for the CD changer because it corrodes and shorts out a couple of pins, causing all the problems. My car doesn't even have a CD changer, just the cable for it. So they're fun, relatively cheap, but they always have gremlins. I'm sort of used to cars breaking in weird ways, so it doesn't bother me, but I could see stuff like that getting frustrating.

Say no more.  The Bimmer of your dreams, and the PO just dumped a lot of money into it.  Now, that could be that he ran out of money, or it could be that he fixed what needed fixing and just decided that he didn't want to go through another round of that in another 6-12 months.

Either way, you are that amount of money he just dumped into it closer to having a reasonable car.  And it's the Bimmer of your dreams.  Seems like a no brainer to me, at the end of the day $3600 is chump change, at $300 per month it's what it would cost you to lease some piece of sh*t for a year.

bs

I'll be the voice of reason here.

BM-expensive friggin' parts-W
Over two-hundred thousand miles on the odometer.
Not an M.
Not a 3-series, but it's even slower.
Plastic coolant pipes - yeah, they're brand new, but they're still brand new PLASTIC.

Unfortunately I didn't have time to go look this weekend... Will be keeping an eye on the ad