Thank you all for the tons of great advice! I drive my cars into the ground (189,000 on my Civic, and now 140,000 on my present Xterra), so buying new is important to me because I don’t want to inherit a used car that has been beaten up in the first 20,000 miles of it’s life and carries both physical and psychological damage 🙂
I would like to wait to buy a car, but I’ve had to fix multiple problems in the last two months that has caused me to lose faith in the car’s reliability (especially since I take the Xterra off-road).
I can tell that the Xterra’s have not been selling well because they cost so much less than when they came out (back when you could fill the tank with Andrew Jackson and not Ulysses S. Grant) so I should have a lot of negotiating room. I’ll check out what I can get in Los Angeles and in San Diego, and use the Cars Direct prices as a starting point.
I’ll be trading in my old Xterra and then paying cash for the new one. I’d really rather not go the private selling route if I can help it (unless anybody here wants a 2000 Xterra with 140,000 miles that runs great and has never been taken off-road!), but I’m afraid that a dealer will just try to make up the lower price on the new car by lowering the trade-in value. Any advice on how to deal with the trade-in and when to tell them you’re going to write a check for the car?
You’ve all given me a lot to think about and some great ideas! Thank You!
