, On Wednesday March 9, 2011, 4:58 pm EST
*Note: This was written by a Yahoo! contributor. Do you have a personal finance story that you'd like to share? Sign up with the Yahoo! Contributor Network to start publishing your own finance articles. Anyone who's ever been in the financing office of a car dealership knows that working through the purchase details on a new car is no fun whatsoever. The dealer is not only trying to make the money listed on the sticker price, but he's also trying to put a few bucks in his and the loan company's pocket as well. The thing that these retailers fear most is an educated and prepared consumer.
Here are four simple things that I did during my last car purchase that saved me over $5,000.
Research
Before I ever stepped foot on the salesman's turf, I pulled up the Internet and found out everything that I could about the make and model that I was going to purchase. I also looked up what private sellers were asking for the same vehicle that I was looking at. Using this knowledge, I set a firm budget for the car which just happened to be $1,400 less than the sticker price that the dealer listed. We ended up settling on a price that was $2,100 less than sticker price, and we got here because I never told him what my maximum budget number was. When he gave a price, I told him "too high."
Reading
When I sat down in the financing office to discuss the financing of the vehicle, I took the itemized listing of fees and made the loan processor define every single item that was listed. There were so many fees that were "administrative" in nature it would make your head spin. I argued every single cost that was listed that wasn't tax, tag or title related. The dealer was assessing me a whopping $600 in unnecessary administrative costs. I know that this seems very small when financing a $30,000 car, but would you carry $600 in unnecessary interest on your credit card for five years?
Perks
People have often told me that I go too far with this one, but I don't think so. In this economy, it is up to the consumer to stretch his or her dollar as far as possible and that's what I did here. First, never drive a car off the lot with anything less than a full tank of gas. At these gas prices, believe me it's worth it. Also, make sure that your car is perfectly detailed. Also, I got my dealer to agree to give me a free oil change every 5,000 miles for the first 50,000 miles. At $30 per oil change, this comes to a savings of approximately $300. He also agreed to give me my first vehicle inspection and standard maintenance care scheduled for that inspection for free. That's another $200 saved.
Financing
That's right. I haggled with the lending team at the dealer and got all of these perks agreed to in writing and then informed that I was going to use my bank for the financing. Yes, it did tick off the financing group. And yes, I had already figured I was going to do this before I even walked onto the car lot. I still wanted to hear what they were offering and I knew that during the financing negotiation I would learn all the fees they had lumped in and that this would be the best time to get the perks I wanted. My bank's lower rates saved me an additional $2,000 over the term of the 5-year loan.
More from this contributor:How to Save Big Money at the Gas Pump
Easy and Simple Ways to Get out of Debt
5 Easy Low Risk Ways to Fund a New Business
Contribute content like this. Start here.
No comments:
Post a Comment