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Adventures in Used Car Values: What Price Mobility?
By brwood(view all posts by brwood)
at 9:54AM Tuesday April 26, 2011
under
Shop Smarter
Last September I wrote two blog posts about used car prices and how to find the best used cars for your dollar. Recently over a couple of beers with co-workers a gauntlet was tossed (not literally) by my supervisor Michael who used to work at a new car dealership. He claimed you can't get a drivable car that will get you to work for less than $1,000. I said I could get one for little more than $500 with enough time.
So a challenge was made and I started shopping. I had two weeks to find a car and drive it to work. I started as always with a trusty multi-listing search engine. Everyday before work, on my lunch hour and after work I started searching every listing in the state of California for cars priced below $2,000. Jaxed, my search engine of choice has a few short-comings and one of them is an inability to limit the search by distance. But you quickly get used to scanning listings for areas way out there. One of the best ways to find a good cheap car no one else wants is to look where old people live. So I started looking in Orange County, Riverside County, and other places as far away as a hundred miles outside of L.A.
Finally I found one or two that looked promising.
I lost out on some clean low mileage cars due to not being quick on the draw on more than one occasion. If you are going to do this you need a good cell phone, some free time to look at cars at a moment's notice, and a wad of cash in your hand.
With only a few days left, I found what looked like a winner. 100+ miles from me in Palm Springs, a locale synonymous with old people, was a man named Buster with a 1979 Ford Fairmont Futura with less than 100k miles on it.
The advertisement was asking $900, but I knew on Craigslist that meant $750 or maybe lower. The car had a "Planned Non-op," which means it wasn't legally registered, but it had no back fees.
This was not optimal, but I was running out of time.
Buster could have been from central casting. He had gotten the car in exchange for some work from a woman who sounded like the original owner. On the floor was a folder with receipts going nearly back to the day the car was built. It started right up and I took it for a spin.
It went fine. It didn't stop worth a damn.
No way we were driving it 100 miles home on the freeway, but otherwise a good car.
When I got back Buster said someone else had been there earlier and was interested in it as well, but had to get $700 and couldn't do it till Monday. We offered him $600 and the car was ours--although I'd have to rent a dolly from U-haul and tow it back. Admittedly, that was also not part of the plan--but even if the brakes had been good, you can't legally drive a non-op car and you can't get the DMV to do the paperwork on a Sunday.
The next step in the process in transferring the Title (this is for California, but most states are similar):
- Seller signs on line 1, if there is a co-owner they sign line 1b and date
- Seller enters mileage from odometer and marks the box if the odometer is broken, or has rolled past 000,000
- Buyer and Seller sign that the mileage is correct
- Bottom signature is for a lien holder, a bank who loaned the buyer money for the car, to sign as well.
- Buyer fills out the Name, Address, Drivers License number on back and takes it to the DMV
Michael bought me lunch on the way home and it was only then that we started to think about what I was going to do with the car. Once I fixed the brakes and drove it to work, it would still only come to a total of $650 and be the cheapest car I'd ever bought. Slowly as we talked, it came to me.
The Ford Fairmont is a Fox Body Ford, same as all the Mustangs up until the early 2000s. Upgrade parts were cheap and plentiful at the junk yard. $650 was within spitting distance of the budgetary limits of the 24 Hours of Lemons endurance race series!
Michael was in, I had been wanting to do something like this forever, and I knew we had at least 2-3 other people at Savings.com that we could rope into it.
Maybe we could even get Savings.com to sponsor it?
Like Darrel Waltrip says at the start of every NASCAR race "Boogity, boogity, boogity, let's go racing boys!" Come back here for updates periodically as I tune up the car, strip off and sell parts we don't need, and upgrade the suspension for the race duty it's going to see.
So a challenge was made and I started shopping. I had two weeks to find a car and drive it to work. I started as always with a trusty multi-listing search engine. Everyday before work, on my lunch hour and after work I started searching every listing in the state of California for cars priced below $2,000. Jaxed, my search engine of choice has a few short-comings and one of them is an inability to limit the search by distance. But you quickly get used to scanning listings for areas way out there. One of the best ways to find a good cheap car no one else wants is to look where old people live. So I started looking in Orange County, Riverside County, and other places as far away as a hundred miles outside of L.A.
Finally I found one or two that looked promising.
I lost out on some clean low mileage cars due to not being quick on the draw on more than one occasion. If you are going to do this you need a good cell phone, some free time to look at cars at a moment's notice, and a wad of cash in your hand.
With only a few days left, I found what looked like a winner. 100+ miles from me in Palm Springs, a locale synonymous with old people, was a man named Buster with a 1979 Ford Fairmont Futura with less than 100k miles on it.
The advertisement was asking $900, but I knew on Craigslist that meant $750 or maybe lower. The car had a "Planned Non-op," which means it wasn't legally registered, but it had no back fees.
This was not optimal, but I was running out of time.
Buster could have been from central casting. He had gotten the car in exchange for some work from a woman who sounded like the original owner. On the floor was a folder with receipts going nearly back to the day the car was built. It started right up and I took it for a spin.
It went fine. It didn't stop worth a damn.
No way we were driving it 100 miles home on the freeway, but otherwise a good car.
When I got back Buster said someone else had been there earlier and was interested in it as well, but had to get $700 and couldn't do it till Monday. We offered him $600 and the car was ours--although I'd have to rent a dolly from U-haul and tow it back. Admittedly, that was also not part of the plan--but even if the brakes had been good, you can't legally drive a non-op car and you can't get the DMV to do the paperwork on a Sunday.
- Seller signs on line 1, if there is a co-owner they sign line 1b and date
- Seller enters mileage from odometer and marks the box if the odometer is broken, or has rolled past 000,000
- Buyer and Seller sign that the mileage is correct
- Bottom signature is for a lien holder, a bank who loaned the buyer money for the car, to sign as well.
- Buyer fills out the Name, Address, Drivers License number on back and takes it to the DMV
Michael bought me lunch on the way home and it was only then that we started to think about what I was going to do with the car. Once I fixed the brakes and drove it to work, it would still only come to a total of $650 and be the cheapest car I'd ever bought. Slowly as we talked, it came to me.
The Ford Fairmont is a Fox Body Ford, same as all the Mustangs up until the early 2000s. Upgrade parts were cheap and plentiful at the junk yard. $650 was within spitting distance of the budgetary limits of the 24 Hours of Lemons endurance race series!
Michael was in, I had been wanting to do something like this forever, and I knew we had at least 2-3 other people at Savings.com that we could rope into it.
Maybe we could even get Savings.com to sponsor it?
Like Darrel Waltrip says at the start of every NASCAR race "Boogity, boogity, boogity, let's go racing boys!" Come back here for updates periodically as I tune up the car, strip off and sell parts we don't need, and upgrade the suspension for the race duty it's going to see.
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