Buying a car takes a lot of work! If you don’t know what you are doing, you can definitely get taken advantage of. You already know some of the do’s when buying a car, here are a few things not to do:
Don’t shirk from negotiating.
Some of us are born to negotiate. We love to push people’s buttons and see how far they will go. Others are more polite and don’t want to ask for more than what is given to them. When buying a car, you must remember that the price is basically never written in stone. You should generally not expect to pay the listed price for a car. Don’t be afraid to make an offer that is really low, perhaps even $5,000 less than the listed price. A dealer leaves a lot of room to negotiate for used cars, often between $4000 and $6000. Four years ago I bought my 1997 Dodge Intrepid from a dealership for $4200. The price on the window was about $9000. I negotiated by telling the salesman that I was only preapproved for a $4000 loan. I paid less than half of the sticker price. Don’t forget to use what you know about the car, or the prices of other cars you have seen as tactics for negotiating.
Don’t give salesmen too much information.
Some salesmen will ask you all kinds of probing questions. They may want your phone number and address from the moment you call their dealership. From the minute you see a vehicle on their lot they may want to know if you are trading in another vehicle, how much money you want to put down, and how much you want your monthly payment to be. Really, it is not necessary to talk about these types of things until you are in the final stages of bargaining. The salesman is only trying to mask the actual price of the vehicle by deducting costs for your trade-in or your monthly payment amount. Instead, get the salesperson to only talk about the price of the vehicle. Answering many of these other questions will only waste your time.
Don’t give in to the monthly payment approach.
As stated above, don’t talk about monthly payments until you have chosen the car you want to buy and you have negotiated a price for it. Instead of a monthly payment, have a specific dollar amount in mind for your vehicle. Remember to focus on the overall cost of the car, and not only on what you will be paying every month. Dealers will try to make a car seem more affordable if they can work the numbers so that you are paying a certain amount every month. Don’t play that game. In the end, you will only be spending more money on your car. Instead, negotiate the actual price of the car.