If you’re planning to buy a new car for yourself and want to save money by selling your old one, the best way to do it is to find out your car value. This is a great way you can save money because you are selling off your old car, especially if you don’t need it anymore. By figuring out how much your car’s value is, you get to have an idea of how much you can sell it in the current market. This is a helpful way you can determine if someone is offering you a very low price in exchange of your car.
The equivalent amount you have taken from these data should be subtracted to the 20% of your income. The difference should be a rough estimate of the car you can afford. So if 20% of you monthly income is, say, $600 minus the total estimate of your monthly maintenance, gas, insurance, etc which we assume to be at $100, the car mortgage you can afford is $400.
Many websites offer good calculators that will give you a good estimate of the worth of a car. This is very important so you can save money when purchasing a car. When you’re selling a car, you’ll be able to get the highest price for it. Some of the best online calculators are Edmunds, Kelley Blue Book and NADA. Other good calculators are also available. It’s advisable to use as many calculators as you can and average the estimate amount because the proximate value varies when using different websites.
The good thing about using such websites is because there are many of them that offer the service for free. All you have to do is to type in the information about your old car. Your car valuation will depend on the information that you have provided such as the model, year, vehicle trim, transmission type, current mileage, and several factors. Based on this data, you will receive the absolute value of your car which you can use as the selling price of your vehicle. This is a helpful tool you can use if you are planning to sell your car to someone who is in the business of buying and selling vehicles.
The last few years have been very difficult for manufacturers and dealerships. Car companies have begun offering significant incentives and rebates on new cars. This was not necessarily the case 3 or 4 years ago. Therefore, it is quite possible you bought a new car 3 years ago when it had just come out and paid full retail for it, while today, the same car has 5000$ in manufacturers’ rebates deducted from its starting price. It would be understandable for you to assume that your car followed standard 3 year depreciation, but unfortunately you now also have to take into account rebates on new cars and tack on that amount to the normal depreciation.
DON’T outright say “$5,000 is all I can spend,” unless you know for a fact that the Canadian blue book value is a lot more. Let’s say that you look up a vehicle’s estimated value on the Kelley Blue Book website. You then determine the vehicle is worth $7,000 on a private sale. It is okay to toss around an exact figure when you know for certain the vehicle is worth a sizable amount more. It is too risky to outright offer $5,000 for a vehicle worth $5,500, as the seller might have accepted even less.
It may make the numbers more accurate, since a dealership will be more inclined to offer their true best price on a vehicle if there is no trade to account for, but it won’t help save money. Once the trade is presented, the numbers on it will simply be lower than if it was presented originally. In fact, the wasting of time and displaying dishonesty in the negotiations can actually hurt the value.
Now you have the car value, according to the condition of the car and the mileage. If you are going to buy a used car, this is a fail-proof way to avoid paying too much for it. All you do is collect the information from the car dealer, go online to a car pricing website, and in less than five minutes, you will have the car’s true value.