A new car

Well for those you who know us...it seems that every couple of years we have a new car. Well, we have done it again. I must say though we are getting pretty savvy at finding the best deal and executing the transaction.

Since the economy is doing so poorly right now, many auto dealers are doing crazy things to get people to buy new cars. In addition, buyers are pinching pennies and more people are trying to be frugal by purchasing used vehicles. Last weekend a dealership in Denver was running a deal...they were offering 110% of Kelly blue book for your used vehicle if you came in and bought a new car. The car that we had was a 2006 subie with all the bells and whistles (leather, heated seats, kicking sound system, performance tires, etc). Well, despite how much I love all those things I don't really "need" them. In times like these, you really have to quantify the difference between what you need and what you want. Despite how young our car was we did have a couple of warranty issues that made the car suspect on its long term reliability. However, I am definitely sold on the performance and quality of the Subaru brand, especially here in Colorado. So Shawn and I thought we would go up and check things out.

Of course it happened to be the VERY last day of the month...which is always good when you are purchasing a car (dealerships are trying to hit their quotas). We took our car in and first found out what they would offer us for it. There were a couple of minor things wrong...it needed new tires, one of the rims was scraped, and it had a couple of scratches where Skyler decided to color on our hood with a rock. So they offered us $17,000 which was about 105% above Kelly blue book at the time. Of course they didn’t offer that to us initially, we had to remind them of all the “deals” they advertised and hold them accountable to the offers. Then we turned around and bought a brand new stripped down Subaru outback. You must note that we came prepared and did our research. The dealership was also advertising that they would match any competitor’s price. So we brought a local paper and showed them the sticker price for the car we wanted from another dealership. So the cost of our new car went from $24,500 to $18,688. Therefore our new car only cost us $1688. And on top of that, since our old car was so new, and we had purchased an extended warranty plan…we were able to get a partial refund of our original investment for the warranty direct from the dealership. So when it was all said and down we literally only paid $568 for a brand new car.

WAS THIS A DEAL OR WHAT. To the right is a factory stock photo of the car we bought. SWEET.