English: Jalopy car in Joshua Tree National Park in Hidden Valley Campground (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
When it’s time to replace your car, most people focus on the new car, instead of the old, but that is ignoring real money. Your old car–unless it has disintegrated–still has value. Sometimes, it’s just time to ask yourself, “When should I sell my car?”
When you’re looking to sell your car (like with We Will Buy Your Car), you generally have several options:
Tow & crush. If your car has been wrecked, doesn’t run, or is just old and beat up, you may be stuck with calling a junkyard and accepting $50 for them to pick up your car and crush it for scrap.
Trade it in. This is probably the least hassle, but–other than #1–doesn’t pay well. Dealerships are willing to pay something under what they will get at a wholesale auction, which is quite a bit less than the blue book value.
Sell it yourself. Now you’re thinking, “He’s going to buy my car! Oh, bother.” It can be a pain, but it’s also the best way to get a decent price for your wheels.
When you sell your car, there are a few things to keep in mind, much like when you sell something on Craigslist.
Don’t be alone. There are bad people in the world, but they don’t like witnesses. Bad things are much less likely to happen if you have company.
Know your price. Specifically, know three price: your dream price, the price that would make you happy, and the absolute lowest price you are willing to accept. Make sure you figure these numbers out ahead of time. Know what you are comfortable with before it comes time to close the deal.
Check IDs. The buyer is going to want to test-drive your car. That’s fine, but you want to make sure you know who is driving off in your car. “Officer, Sumdood took my car. He was wearing jeans.” That won’t get your car back.
Clean it up. Get the car detailed before you show it to a potential buyer. A sparkling-clean car will almost always bring in a few hundred extra dollars. It’s well worth the expense.
Following this plan should make the sale go as smoothly as possible and bring you the most possible money.
Readers, what have you done to dispose of an old car?
This is a sponsored post written to provide some insight into the world of used car retail.
This morning, I released a bit of software for sale and I’ve got more coming in the next couple of weeks.
What does the software do?
It’s a WordPress plugin that let’s you bulk upload & schedule Word documents as posts. You can upload 50 Word docs and get 50 posts scheduled to run once a week. It takes about 10 minutes to make that happen. It handles the category, author, and posting time for you.
Why?
I build niche sites. When I do, I usually hire out most of the writing. It’s a pain in the butt to get handed 50 or a 100 articles to convert, post, and schedule. So I solved that problem.
It’s called Word Poster. You can get the details here. I figure that this thing saves me at least an hour of work for every 10 articles I buy.
I admit it: I’m a geek. I’m not a hobby geek who only geeks on the weekends. I’m a full-fledged, licensed and certified geek. I am a geek about so many wondrous things that it’s hard to list them all. My wife knows, my kids know. It’s not much of a secret. One of my many geek qualifications is my sordid history of gaming. Role-playing, tabletop only. If that’s gibberish, it’s okay. Nobody needs to understand my geekitude but me.
I started playing Dungeons and Dragons more than 15 years ago. There were no live chickens or human sacrifice. Just a small group of geeks, proto-geeks, pseudo-geeks, and the occasional nerd playing DnD in a poorly lit room for several hours. We laughed, we cried, we fought evil, saved the world, and raised the stock price of an assortment of caffeinated beverage companies.
As the man said, I told you that, so I could tell you this:
DnD taught me many things. It taught me THAC0 calculation, dice-identification, and the fact that no woman, anywhere, considers tabletop roleplaying to be an alpha-male trait. “I’m a level 73 kinder warrior-mage-thief” is not a pickup line anywhere in the world, even Gen-Con. Remember that. Also remember, the singular of dice is die. If your are talking about one, it’s a die. Get it wrong and I will throw a bag full of dice at you and make you dig out the purple, sparkles-like-a-vampire, 27-sided die from among the hundreds of other dice.
DnD also taught me some surprising things about the world of personal finance, which is not a part of a planar campaign.
All the best toys cost too much. At the current exchange rate of 10 silver pieces(sp) to 1 gold piece(gp), potions of extra healing will drive you into debtor’s prison. Just as a sword of extra-slaying +10 will cost you everything you earned raiding that castle for the last 6 Wednesday evenings, so will a big screen TV set you back a full month’s salary. Don’t risk your life or sell your life’s energy for something fleeting, just because it’s “the best” or the newest gadget, geegaw, or artifact.
Pretty Lady
Never sell your soul for a castle or a horse. When the Baatezu come to offer you a “no money down, 0% for a year, all-expenses-paid, surrender-your-first-born” deal for a castle or the prettiest horse in the park, take a cue from the former First Lady. Just say no. Spending money today that you have to pay for tomorrow is almost always a bad idea. Don’t spend your soul, spend your savings. Don’t buy something until you can afford it. A Lexus or an Arabian, a mansion or a rambler. Are any of them worth auctioning your future?
Your armor isn’t stronger just because it’s shiny. A suit of Full-Plate of Protection-From-the-Charms-of-Bar-Wenches +5 may look pretty, but it’s not going to help against the orcs, kobolds, or trolls unless, of course, they are wearing skirts and sitting on a bar-stool above a sawdust-covered floor. Does the shiny new iPod really provide a benefit, or is it just a shiny gadget to woo the ladies?
A good sword is necessary to keep your stuff. This is a not a call to self-defense, or mugger, err, orc-slaying–though why that’s ever viewed as a negative is beyond me. You need to be aggressive in defending your loot. Call your credit card companies and demand they turn over the booty, err, lower your rates. Tell your friends to step away from the Diamond Ray of Disappearance, err, expensive outings or you will chop off their heads, err…no wait, that one can stay. I think my friends may be scared of me.
[ad name=”inlineleft”]The promised reward for completing an adventure isn’t the only way to make money. Sure, the local duke(your boss), may be willing to pay you a chest of gems(your salary) for defending the town from the ravages of the Tarrasque(your job), but that isn’t the only way to make money. You could do your job, collect your pay, and go home at night, but why? Don’t forget to pick up the loot along the way. If you spot the shiny penny, grab it, whether it’s abandoned gold, a new idea for a niche-blog, or a chance to turn your leisure hobbies into money. There are thousands of ways to make money outside of your day job. Every one will help your bottom line.
It takes cunning to slay the dragon. When tackling your debt(dragon), wading in swinging your sword may be emotionally satisfying, in the short term, but long term, it’s just a painful method of reminding yourself that you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup. Make plans. Have a strategy. Come out a winner. Then, sit down for beer and dragon steak. Goal-less, plan-less attacks fail in the long-term.
When my mother-in-law died, we went through all of her accounts and paid off anything she owed.
The Discover card she’d carried since the 80s–a card that had my wife listed as an authorized user–had a balance of about $700. We paid that off with the money in her savings account. They cashed out the accumulated points as gift cards and closed the account.
A few months ago, we decided it was time to buy an SUV, to fit our family’s needs. We financed it, to give us a chance to take advantage of a killer deal while waiting for the state to process the title transfer on an inherited car we have since sold.
Getting good terms was never a worry. Both of us had scores bordering on 800. Since our plan was to pay off the entire loan within a few months, we asked for whatever term came with the lowest interest rate.
Then the credit department came back and said that my wife’s credit was poor. I chalked it up to a temporary blip caused by closing the oldest account on her credit report and financed without her. No big deal.
Since we decided to rent our my mother-in-law’s house, we’ve discussed picking up more rental properties. That’s a post for another time, but last week, we went to get pre-approved for a mortgage. During the process, the mortgage officer asked me if my wife had any outstanding debt that could be ignored if we financed without her.
Weird.
A few days ago, we got the credit check letter from the bank. Her credit score? 668.
What the heck?
I immediately pulled her free annual credit report from annualcreditreport.com, which is something I usually do 2-3 times per year, but had neglected for 2012.
There are currently two negatives on her report.
One is a 30 day late payment on a store card in 2007. That’s not a 120 point hit.
The other is an $8 charge-off to Discover. As an authorized user. On an account that was paid.
Crap.
We called Discover to get them to correct the reporting and got told they don’t have it listed as a charge-off. They did agree to send a letter to us saying that, but said they couldn’t fix anything with the credit bureaus.
A few years ago, my wife and I were discussing life improvement, the options in front of us, and our future goals. She said she felt trapped by the scope of our goals and didn’t know where to start. That led to a discussion on
goal (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)
achieving our goals, which led to this.
Examine your life. Take stock of every aspect of your life. What pleases you? What upsets you? What do you do that adds no value to your life? Or worse, removes value? What do you do that adds the most value? What would you like to change? Eliminate? Improve? Count the small things. Nothing is insignificant. Write it all down and be specific.
Analyze your list. Are there any obvious patterns? Is there a single thread that is making you miserable or affecting multiple other items? Would eliminating 1 factor improve 90% of the rest? Is there a bad job or a toxic relationship ruining your happiness? Be honest and be critical.
What are your dreams? Where would you like to be in six months? A year? 5? 10? How would you like to retire? When? Write it all down. This is now your life plan.
Set goals. Set concrete, definable goals. Set goals that have an obvious success point. When you reach your goal, you want to be able to point it out. “Lose weight” is not a goal. “Lose 50 pounds in the next year” is a measurable, definable, concrete goal. Set incremental goals to reach your larger goals and, more importantly, your dreams.
Here’s an example:
Dream: Retire at 50.
Incremental Goal: Get a 10% raise within 6 months
Incremental Goal: Eliminate debt within 3 years
Incremental Goal: Max out 401k contribution
Incremental goal: Save 150,000 within 10 years
Incremental Goal: Save 45k each year after that.
Retire
When you are setting up your goal plan, make sure to include the analyzed items mentioned earlier. These are the things that will make today happier for you.
Now, you have examined your life. You have analyzed the results. You’ve gathered your dreams and compiled a goal plan based on your hopes, dreams, goals and desires. What’s next?
We’re going to take a page from David Allen. It’s time to Get Things Done. What do you have to do next to reach your goals? What is the next step? Don’t let yourself be overwhelmed by the scope of the entire list. Select one single item from your plan and look for the one single next step to make on the path to that goal.
Going back to the retirement goal plan, the next step towards a 10% raise could be researching salaries for your job description in your area to give you ammunition in the meeting with your boss. It could be updating your resume to hunt for a better paying job, or even just studying up on some resume tips.
If you want to run a marathon next year, the next step is to start walking every day to train your body.
If you want to improve communication with your spouse, the next step is probably to let her know.
If you want to eliminate debt, the next step may be setting up a budget or canceling unnecessary services like cable.
Every goal has a path leading to it. If that’s not true, you haven’t defined a concrete measurable goal.
Examine your life. Analyze your situation. Know WHAT you want. Know what you want to change. Set goals to get there, one step at a time. Take a single step towards your goals.
Then take another.
What are you doing to reach your goals and improve your life?
No matter how many excellent books you read, or how many experts you consult, sometimes the best advice comes from beast out fertilizing my yard. My dog is pretty smart. At middle-age, she’s got no debt, no stress, and no possibility of being fired. I asked her what her secrets are, and she gave me 5 rules for managing her finances.
Sniff around. You never know when or where an opportunity will present itself. Keep your eyes open and look in some unusual places and you may just find the golden opportunity you’ve been waiting for. Jacob and Susan D’Aniello have a multi-million dollar franchise called DoodyCall. They have turned themselves into millionaires, starting with a shovel, a leash, and a plastic bag. Never be afraid to look your future in the eye.
Don’t be afraid to sniff a butt. It’s important to know who you are dealing with, especially when your are making life-changing or expensive decisions. If it doesn’t smell right, bare your teeth and back off. Seriously, in most situations, you can trust your gut instinct. Especially if that instinct is telling you to run away. Read everything you sign. If you don’t understand it, find someone who does. Know what you are getting into at all times. Get referrals. Call the Better Business Bureau. You are in charge of protecting your own interests.
Lick your own butt. Watching your emergency fund grow is nice, but not everything is. There are some aspects of personal finance that are downright unpleasant, but ignoring them is worse. You can’t ignore an upside-down budget forever, or it will never get fixed. Sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and do what needs to be done, no matter how distasteful. But keep the mouthwash handy.
Bury a bone. Minds out of the gutter, please. Save for the lean times. You may have two bones today, but what about tomorrow, or next week? What if the bone-fairy never comes to visit again? Make your surplus last, because you never know when life will whack you with a newspaper. If you don’t have an emergency fund, start one. Today. Now. Go set up an automatic transfer of $10 per week. Now. If you don’t have an emergency fund, everything is an emergency.
Wag your tail. Don’t be afraid to enjoy the good things. When you make progress on your debt, congratulate yourself. Take credit and take pride in what you’ve accomplished. It’s more important to be happy than rich, so don’t obsess over the little things, or the material things. Enjoy your family, enjoy your job(or find a job you can enjoy), enjoy your life.
Maybe I shouldn’t write while watching my dog poop at 5AM.
Update: This post has been included in Festival of Frugality.
