Yuppie Sherpa

Last winter, I drove my beloved 1999 Pontiac Grand Prix GTX face-first into a cement highway divider during an ice storm. I bounced off the steering wheel and found myself faced with a horrible pain — used car shopping!

My first suggestion for anyone finding themselves faced with this necessary evil is to separate your trips into two categories: evaluation and shopping.

During your evaluation trips, you’ll visit car dealerships to test drive different cars and sample the various price ranges they come in. You should endeavor to learn as much as you can from independent sources about the makes and models you’re interested in. A car salesman is not going to come clean about the fact that the upholstery in the Mazda3 will snag and run if you so much as look at it the wrong way.

Your shopping trips are where you go out with the intention of buying a car. These are the trips where your price haggling takes place.

A car salesman’s goal is to combine these into one trip. Your goal is to keep them separate.

Here are a few tips to make your trips successful…

Get a ride to the dealership

When I did my used car shopping, my car was in a scrap heap somewhere. It was during this unfortunate time that I learned the value of this little trick.

See, a car salesman wants you to buy the car now. If you drove yourself onto the lot, that means you either have to leave with two cars, or trade yours in and leave with the one they just sold you. But if you don’t have your trade-in with you…

Bingo! Exit plan! No matter how badly they want to sit you down and get you to agree to a price, no car salesman is going to promise you a dollar amount on a trade-in they haven’t seen in person.

Shop locally first

Like it or not, used car dealers are competing with private sellers for your business. This is precisely why the Kelley Blue Book lists separate values for retail, trade-in and private party sales. By looking in the newspapers, auto trader magazines, Craigslist and eBay, you can compile a price range for your desired vehicle in your location. This, much to the dismay of many used car salesmen, is the local market value for your car of choice.

It also never hurts to print what you find and bring it with you. The printouts won’t make any difference to a salesman, but they’re nice to have handy when they refuse to believe anyone would sell such a car for less than they’re offering.

Get the car’s wholesale value

A used car has a wholesale price which is far lower than what your salesman is asking you to pay. This is the price the dealership paid for the car when it was traded in, purchased at auction or bought from a wholesaler. Theoretically, this is the number that the dealership cannot sell for less than without cutting their own throat.

Finding out the wholesale value of a car involves asking everyone you know if they have a friend or relative who works in a car dealership that can look it up for you. All serious dealerships have wholesale prices for cars, even if they don’t have any of that car on the lot themselves. They need to have an idea of what to pay in the event that a customer wants to trade one in. So while these prices may not be exact, they’re an estimate that the dealership considers reliable.

Does this mean that you can’t get it for less than wholesale? Of course it doesn’t.

When I told my local Mazda dealer that I could buy my car of choice at the dealership down the road for thousands less than he was asking, he said it was impossible. He said “that price is below what the wholesale is on this car — I can’t even buy it for that!”

And he was right! But the dealer who offered me this low price was in a bit of a slump and had bought a car that didn’t fit what his average customer was looking for. As a result, he was willing to lose a little money just to get it out of the showroom. Now, a year later, I could sell the car with all of the miles I’ve put on it and make money.

Don’t get steamrolled — know!

Something is only worth what someone else is willing to pay for it.

Know what a car is worth to you. Do not rely on a salesman who eats off his commission to establish the car’s value for you. Unless you truly misunderstood the value (as defined above) of the car in the first place, nothing you’re told while on the lot should be able to change your mind.

Before I settled on my car, I toyed with the idea of buying a used SUV at my local Mitsubishi dealership. I knew what I was willing to pay for it, but the salesman wouldn’t come close to my price and he let me walk. Then they called my cell a day later and asked me to come back in, which I did. And again, they let me walk. Three times I sat there and refused to budge on my price, three times they let me walk.

A little under a month after I purchased my Mazda, I stopped back into the same showroom with a friend who was car shopping. Sure enough, the same Mitsubishi Endeavor was still sitting there. When the salesman learned I had gone elsewhere, he immediately began trying to push the SUV on my friend!

If the car is really worth so much more than what I was asking, then why was it parked in the middle of an indoor showroom, in May, where nobody could test drive it in the first place? Remember, you’re probably not the first to be offered the car you’re looking at, which means that everyone else has passed on it.

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