What you have to find out is what the bank in you specific area goes by. On the east coast, most of that is KBB, anound here, it NADA (mountain states edition.) You will get a lot of lowlife car dealers throwing around KBB, on the selling end and trying to use NADA on the trade. That doesn't fly if you have a clue about dealing on a vehicle.

I ended up keeping my truck and selling it out right after the fact versus taking the huge fuggn he was tryn to give me.

I was shopping for new, but what I did was get the email address of floor managers at all the local dealers of my preferred type and send out an email saying what I wanted and that the lowest price would win. It worked out for me.

In most places, if you can get $2000 to $2500 off a used car, your getting a good deal.

Thanks for all the tips.. I had never even heard of nada until this thread..

I get to go visit a bunch of used car salesmen this weekend, not my favorite thing to do, although I am excited to get some new wheels.

Hopefully i'll find something this weekend and be done with it.

Thanks again

Just bought a used SUV.

We test drove a Hyundai Tuscon and within 3 hours had a call offering $2995 off sticker. That was $1100 under NADA.

We ended up buying a Hyundai Santa Fe and got it for $2595 under sticker, and 900 under NADA. It was in fantastic condition though.

Personally, I don't have the patience to dicker with salesmen. I usually do a lot of online research to see what the type of vehicle I want is selling for, and I'll wait until I find something I feel is reasonably priced and then I just go buy the damn thing. I'm not going to spend hours upon hours in a car dealership trying to beat them down by a few hundred bucks.

Thats the thing though.. I can see what they're asking, but i have no idea what they are actually selling for.. I wish there was a site that showed purchase prices like you can do with houses.

Yeah, that would be nice. Obviously I meant that I checked around the asking prices. I should add that most of the vehicles I have bought have been under $10K, there's not quite as much room to dicker with them anyway. Spending $40K on something to drive is inconceivable to me.

I'd recommend edmunds.com also. I've been told nada and kbb are a few months behind where edmunds is more current. I'd also look at prices and autos on carmax.com.

Damn, I hate those dealers............

Me too :p

:D

You and me both, brother. As far as I'm concerned, a car, truck, or whatever, is a box on wheels that gets me from point A to point B.

Oh, and it is also mindboggling to me to have more cars than drivers. My ass will only fit in one car at a time.

If you negotiate from the sticker down, you've already lost. As KCNative said earlier, you need to figure out what they paid for the vehicle based on trade-in values and make the dealer negotiate up from there.

The other way that I have found to be effective is to send out a form letter to several dealerships letting them know that you will be accepting blind bids from all of them and will make a purchase from the lowest bidder on the next to the last day of the month.