More about buying cars

My friend Stephanie, it seems is trying to buy a car, and has expressed many burning questions about buying a car, and instead of write a blog post in her comments section like a blog-hog, I thought I'd just write up another post to clarify a few things and answer more questions.

What I first decided was why I wanted a new car. Fuel economy. and I looked like a soccer-mom. Probably good for not getting tickets driving through a college town at midnight, but not so much for the 'hey, let's take my car' response from friends. So I concentrated on Fuel economy, and figured not looking like a 45 year-old woman while driving would follow suite. And I think it did. If you like to go camping and hiking or just like destroying the planet, you could go for a 4 wheel drive SUV of some sort. If you actually *are* a soccer mom, then there's a used van waiting for you at the Hyundai Automax in Norman, OK. Old, but works great. Just had the transmission replaced, but you'll have to replace the left tie rod next time you go in for an alignment. I also decided to go with a used car, mostly because I'm cheap. But I've also read it's a better investment to go with a used car instead of a new one (especially if it's certified and all that), since the value of the car drops tremendously as soon as you drive it off the lot. The difference is that a new car will have a warranty and shouldn't be difficult for at least a few years. A used car will most assuredly have a much smaller warranty if any at all, and you'll be paying to take care of it. But your monthly payment will probably be smaller.

Once I decided what I wanted, I got on Autotrader and checked out everything in the area that was within my budget. If I found a car that interested me, I looked it up on consumer reports to check out it's reliability and fuel economy (my parents have an account, and it's awesome). Some years for some models aren't very good, and some are spectacular. After a while, that gave me an idea how good certain models are and what I should be looking for. I also checked out the blue book price for the year and model to see if it was priced well. During all of that, I had a carfax.com account to look up vin numbers. If a car is new with low mileage and dirt cheap, there is probably somehting wrong with it. Carfax.com can tell you how many owners the car has had, and how many miles were last reported on it. They can also tell you if an incident has ever been reported by a DMV or if the manufacturer has canceled the warranty. I'm not sure if it's neccesary, but it's cool.

So by the time my dad came out to Norman to help me check out dealerships, I had a pretty good idea what was available and what was good and possibly in my price range. It happened pretty quickly, but I had done my homework, so I was ready.

08.08.08

My last post was going to be about my vacation in Colorado and also about Murphey's law since I came down with a cold about 3 days into the trip. But I actually just bought a used car last night (sweet!), and I figured I wouldn't jinx it by writing about Murphey's law. And since this is right after my post about my old white van breaking down and recycling Starbucks cups to help with my 'carbon debt' (yay for buzzwords. Now if we just start calling it a nano-carbon debt, we'll confuse the hell out of the news-media) I figured it was well placed.

That's my new car!! It's a 2005 Hyundai Elantra, and not to be a Hyundai salesman or anything, but Hyundais are pretty good cars that you can usually get pretty cheap. It gets twice the gas mileage as my not-so-hippie-van did--that's right, over 30 instead of around 15!! . . . I thought I might enlighten those less fortunate *cough*Kevin*cough*, and tell the story of how I bought the car. ( ;-) Kevin, it seems, recently bought a car and thinks he got jerked around a bit) Well, I don't know if I got a spectacular deal, but my dad is a salesman and also knows a bit about cars, and he helped me out and seems to think I got a good deal, so that's good enough for me.

We went to a few places on Wednesday and drove some cars around but didn't really like them terribly. I'm also difficult to please b/c I'm cheap! I wanted a car under 9,000 and half the dealers just didn't have anything in that category. I had decided on 9,000$ because we thought we could trade the hippie van in for around 2,000, and I figured I could pay 7000 off in 3 years just fine. I also figured that any car in my price range would be so old that I wouldn't want to be paying it off for more than 3 years anyway. So we walk up to this Hyundai dealership and tell the lead salesperson that we are looking for a fuel-efficient car under 9,000. She brings us a salesman and he shows us a car that I test drive. It's the Elantra above. It's an 05 and it's still under warranty, so obviously we are interested. We ask for the price. Here's where it gets sticky.

First they just give us 2 numbers. 1500 down and 250/month. I was amazed that they didn't even give us a term. I had no idea at that point how much the car actually cost--apparently some people take the offer just like that. crazy people. So we let them know that I had my own financing (we use USAA who generally gives a fairly good rate), and that we really just want to know HOW MUCH the car was. oh. they got it. They then offered us 500$ for my van (what??) and priced the Elantra at 11,000. Not even close to our 9000$. We were a bit annoyed, because we'd just wasted time on a car that was 3,500$ out of my price range. Oi! We tried to tell them it was too much and get out of there, but of course they will not allow that, so they brought out the viper . . .

The dealership is more concerned with how much you can afford per month than how much you want the car to cost. If they can get most any price within your monthly payment range by stretching the payment out for 7 or, it turns out, sometimes even 10 years, that's what they try to do. The head of sales came out and tried to weasel out of me how much I was willing to spend per month and fix me right up. I swear we had to explain to her about 3 times that we were choosing a car based on the overall price and not the monthly payment . . . we also told them that if we could only get $500 for the van, we would just sell it ourselves. Then we told them we would not be purchasing a car that evening under any circumstances but that we would keep in touch. Numbers were exchanged.

The next morning I got a call from the salesman who we had test driven with (good thing, too, because the head of sales was the scariest lady I had ever seen, and I was not inclined to do business with her ever.) to inform me that they could definitely get me 1000$ on the van. I called him back later that afternoon to let him know that if we couldn't get 1500$ for the van, we weren't even going to bother trading it in and that I was going to shop around a bit first. He said it was plausible to get 1500 for the van, but that I would need to bring the van in so their people could check it out. They always want to bring you in. I suppose it's home field advantage. My dad let me know that it's always easier to negotiate on the phone. On the phone, you're on equal footing. You can cut him off or even hang up on him if need be ;-). So I discussed it with my dad, and we both agreed that paying off an 05 for 4 years is acceptable, but that it was still too expensive. I figured I could do 10,000-1500$ = $8500 over 4 years, so this is what I did (at my dad's wonderful suggestion): I called the dealership and told them that I was busy (which I am) and that if they couldn't get it down to 10,000$ with a 1500$ trade in on the van, I just simply did not have time to come in and talk to them (which I did not). So the guy told me he would talk it over with his boss and call me back.

He called me back in about 5 minutes (it was raining, and nobody seems to go anywhere when it's raining--especially to dealerships) and said it was a deal, so I went over and bought the car. whew.

Hah. And after I filled out the paper work and did the loan stuff and got my keys and everything was settled, I pulled my new car around to empty my stuff out of the van. I unlocked the car and one of the sliding doors wouldn't open . . . sometimes that lock sticks, but it hasn't done it in ages. I thought it was pretty hilarious that it did it right after I traded it in and right in front of the salesman. oh well, it's yours now! Maybe they know how to fix that. Lord know we had no idea . . .

Anyway I hope it was a good story. I've already had a dream that someone stole my car, so you know that I like it! Have a happy olympic starting day! I really love the 08.08.08. Why in the world is that so cool? It's just another day, and yet . . . it's epic.

PS. I just google image searched 'carbon debt' and the second page is my starbucks cup from the last blog post. wow! I had no idea there were so little pictures related to carbon debt. Cool!