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I’ve had quite a bit of money sitting in my savings account for some time now which was designated for a new vehicle. After realizing that I was driving a vehicle that was worth no more than $1000 with a cracked windshield and no air-conditioning in the middle of June in South Dakota (90+ degrees Fahrenheit!), I decided it was time to buy a newer vehicle.

I first decided what my budget was going to be, I decided that I wanted to spend somewhere between $5,000 and $6,000 for something a little bit newer, nicer, and maybe something that gets a little bit better mileage. I first did a bunch of research as to what type of vehicles that I might want to look for, and came up with a list of about 10 that I would be happy with.

Instead of going around from dealer to dealer in the three or four cities that I could potentially buy a vehicle from and see where I could get the best deal, I leveraged the internet. I checked out at least 30 car lot’s inventories online, and looked at several different vehicles that I might want to look at. I narrowed the list to about 5 vehicles, and then compared them by means of which model I’d most likely to have, and which place I was likely to get the best deal.

Once I had one selected, I asked around about the automotive dealer that I was going to. I was told that the guy who runs it is pretty reasonable. So I went down, test-drove the vehicle, which was a 2001 Dodge Stratus, took a good look at the engine, everything seemed fine. I had an automotively inclined friend take a quick look at it, he said it looked fine. It had about 100,000 miles, the KBB was about 5,500 and it was listed at $5,800.

So I brought the car back, told the dealer that he’d have to give me a better deal than what was on the sticker. He told me that “someone else had stopped by and looked at the car and said that they were interested in it as well.” I just laughed, “Come on…seriously…do you really expect me to believe that?” He was pretty adamant…I mean, who falls for that one? It’s one of the oldest negotiation tactics in the book. Anyway, I got the price down to just under $5,500 which was fine, I was happy paying KBB prices, and he took my 95 intrepid for $700, and I probably wouldn’t get much more if I sold it on the open market since it had 177,000 miles on it and had some physical defects.

After paying the taxes and licenses, I was able to bring my gold 2001 Dodge Stratus home for just about $5,000, which isn’t bad at all.



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