When I got the new car, I didn’t even ask the dealer about trading in the Mazda, figuring they would offer very little, assuming they would even want it. I have been using Kelly Blue Book to track the declining value of the car over the years and it said my average trade-in price would be $3,854 while the average private party sale would be $5,658. I can’t actually get either of those because for condition, you can only put in “Fair” as the lowest, but the paint is oxidized and there is some damage to the back bumper from a minor fender bender. I got $700 for the fender bender and if I throw in $500 for the paint, I get to around $4400, which is what I would like to get for the car. One reason a 12 year old car like that is ranked that high is I have only put 58,000 miles on it.<\/p>\n
I put an ad for the car on Nextdoor, but heard nothing. Looking at a few other cars there, it seemed like I was pricing it about right knowing I would get haggled down a little. To cast a wider net I thought I would put it on Autotrader, which is only $25. Looking there, my car seems like a real deal, but I realized most of the cars on Autotrader are from dealers and also may not be selling or they wouldn’t be there anymore. All of the Mazdas in my price range had way more miles on them. Anything with as many miles as my car was generally much newer and much more expensive. I tried comparing similar cars that are more popular like the Civic and Corolla and got about the same results. So I feel good, but who knows if anything on Autotrader is actually selling?
\n<\/p>\n
Then I thought I should look up any car with less than 60,000 miles for less than $5,000 to see if there is anything comparable at all. This search resulted in 12 cars. It was an interesting assortment of cars:<\/p>\n
Plus these two:<\/p>\n
(The two cars marked with * are the only ones from private sellers instead of dealers). Jeb had told me in the last few years that he heard Clark Howard saying you could get a Leaf for really cheap, but a quick check at the time didn’t back that up. But these two cars are newer than anything else in the list. When I was shopping for Ford Escapes, I knew I was paying about a $4,500 premium to get a hybrid. For that difference you could buy a new non-hybrid plus the used electric Leaf! The Leaf has very little maintenance in general, but the big problem is the battery pack degrades over time and is about $5,000 to replace, so I am assuming these models have degraded batteries. Later Leaf models had better batteries too. It could be their batteries are fine. But the miles are low because you can only drive these about 40 miles on a charge.<\/p>\n
Anyway, we will see how things go with Autotrader. Another website is cars.com where you can list for free, but if anyone buys the car, you pay $99, though cars.com handles the money, which is nice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I got the new car, I didn’t even ask the dealer about trading in the Mazda, figuring they would offer very little, assuming they would even want it. I have been using Kelly Blue Book to track the declining value of the car over the years and it said my average trade-in price would … Continue reading “Used Car for Sale”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4145"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4145\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4147,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4145\/revisions\/4147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}