Get Your Game Face On

Tomorrow morning we wake up bright and early and go out car shopping. Looking through the car ads I found a lot of dealers are doing holiday “specials”, so we are going to see if we can get a deal of our own.

One place is offer a minimum of $3000 for any trade-in that has less than 100K miles on it and will go 60 MPH. My truck will do both, and $3000 would be fantastic considering the transmission is about to go any minute.

Another place is offering a 24-month lease for $88/month for a 4-door sedan. We don’t meet all their discount requirements, but even if it goes up to $125 it’s a good deal.

Still another place has a 2000 Honda Accord with 78K miles on it for $7995. If they offer us $2000 on the truck a a trade-in, that could be a nice deal and I can probably get another 20K miles out of it before trading it in for a new car in a few years.

So we’ll hit the road by 9 a.m. and go to four different dealerships and see which one has the best offer for us. We don’t want to spend more than $150 per month and want the trade-in to be the only “cash” we put on the table for a ‘new’ car whether it’s a loan or lease. After going through two prior car-buying situations in the past four years, I’ve learned that it’ll be no more mister nice guy. No more getting jacked around and paying more for a car than is necessary. We just can’t afford that, and so we have nothing to lose. If a car salesman doesn’t give us the deal we want, we’ll just go to the next place. There are 100s of dealerships in our area – surely one of them will have the deal that meets our needs. I’ll go to every single one of them if that’s what it takes.

I’ll admit, though, I hope we only have to go to four, tops.