so when I bought this car it had a hole in the exhaust pipe further up the muffler. Cost me $45 for new pipe, cheap fix. Muffler rusted from the inside out a couple months ago and the tip fell off, new muffler $100.

Now there's a hole behind the catalytic converter or possibly the holes in the catalytic converter. The whole front-end of the exhaust is rusty, from the head pipe to a ways past the catalytic converter.

If you inherited this problem, what would you do? (bear in mind, inspection isn't until a year later)

 

Find exactly where the leak is......then replace. I'll guess the hole is in the intermediate pipe.