I’ve been reading a lot of fancified productivity and frugality blogs lately, and almost all of them suggest the same thing when it comes to buying a car.

Buy used.

More specifically, but a used, unpopular vehicle that you know all the KBB values of in an unpopular color, so you have optimal leverage to negotiate down the price. Have no brand loyalty, and ideally purchase a domestic car instead of an import (this part I disagree with entirely, but whatever), because the maintenance costs will be lower. Don’t get the extended warranty, be ready to walk away at any point, buy before your current car is broken so you have the advantage.

I went out initially looking for a used car, intending to follow most of these guidelines, but I had a series of setbacks along the way, which led me to buying new instead. Here’s my math on it.

I went out with a budget of $10,000-12,000, and the constraints of a car that was newer than 7 years old, had less than 100,000 miles on the clock, got good gas mileage (no trucks with 8mpg, something in the 25+ range as EPA rated), and felt fun to drive (I like cars, and I like to drive briskly on occasion). I didn’t care what color it was as long as it wasn’t lavender, and had four doors (avoid sports car insurance premiums or anything crazy like that).

I did research constantly on the internet. I found models and brands I was interested in, found out that lot inventory for used cars on the internet is much more accurate than for new. I found cars I wanted to look at and went out to look at them. I went out ten times to used car lots, six separate trips, spending 4-6 hours per trip looking.

By the end, I was ready to stab somebody in the fucking face, until I went to Ron Tonkin Nissan and talked to Jeff Williamson, who treated me like a human being, and seemed to know something about what the fuck they had on the lot. He talked to me about cars he owned, he talked to me about the things he liked about them, the things he didn’t. The big problem was that they had no used cars I was even partially interested in.

They had a couple of ginormous Toyota Tundras and Nissan XTerras that would have gotten horrid gas mileage. They had a Nissan 350ZX, brightass red, which would have taken another $100 a month at least in insurance. They had a Nissan somethingorother from about 1994 with 200,000 miles on the till. The 350ZX looked fun to drive, but failed every other test. The Somethingorother had been depreciated fully, it was a zero-value car, and they wanted $5000 for it. The trucks were, well, trucks.

Faced with giving my money to this guy versus giving it to the guy who treated me like shit for trying to buy a car at KBB value, it was an easy choice. Here were my justifications in no particular order.

• I felt good giving money to this guy.
• I liked the car.
• It fit all of my criteria.
• The sticker price (not the purchase price, more on this below) was only $2500 more than my stated budget for a used car.
• The cost of legal defense for attempted murder (through face stabbing) would far outweigh the $2500 premium.
• The car would extend the range of my job-seeking possibilities, making it easier for me to negotiate pay increases.

Here is the bad end of this.

• My purchase price ended up being significantly more than I wanted to pay. $17,000.
• I made the mistake of not haggling. This could likely have saved me $2000. (A “dealership interest fee”, basically a tax for buying a popular car that I could have pretty easily negotiated away, by starting to walk away instead of being in the “I’m buying this car today” mentality) This would have saved me $42 a month, or $2500 over the course of the loan.
• I got the extended warranty. This cost me $1500 (the only part I haggled on, down from $3500). It has saved me $400 (airbag replacement and wheel sensor replacement). This might end up on the positives list, but for now, it’s a negative.
• I am suffering the full value-depreciate of new car ownership.
• Because I am suffering the full value-depreciation of new car ownership, I had to pay for GAP insurance.
• I have to pay for full coverage insurance at $500 deductibles per my loan terms. This is another mixed account, as I believe in the importance of having uninsured/underinsured motorist coverage and more than pure liability, but I’d rather have the deductibles be at $1000 instead, and pump the $20-30 a month it would save me into my IRA.
• Because of my impatience, I was unable to qualify for a loan at the bank I work for, which would have saved me 2-2.5% interest. By itself, I could have saved $25 a month on my payment ($1500 over the course of the loan). Combined with negotiating out the $2000, it would save me $62, (not $42+$25 because of the reduced principal), or $3700 over the course of the loan.

This is still a net benefit, because the car I was relying upon as secondary transportation (primary being my bicycle) broke down just two months into new car ownership, plus a workplace reorganization caused me to have to go to an office 16 miles away instead of 8, and my days stretched from a consistent 8 hours to a fluctuating 8-14, making biking to work difficult. The car really saved my ass in the first quarter of the year, and my ability to perform those long days without being utterly pooped got me a small raise (very small, about $2500 a year) and a moderately significant bonus ($4000, almost half going straight to the tax man). This allowed me two things,

• It gave me enough money to get my eyes corrected with LASIK.
• It gave me the inspiration and fiscal “cushion” to purchase a house. (Which, despite a lot of rumbling right now about how great renting is, is a benefit.)

So, buying the car was a very important change in my lifestyle. I had spent much of the past 10 years afraid of credit (having been burned early with a $300 credit card turning into a $1500 collection). Now, I am still wary, but I am coming to credit on my own terms. I carry no outstanding credit card debt, all collections on my credit report are closed and paid, and the only things I am using credit to purchase are, in the long run, a net benefit to me, the car (because of the mobility, and the leisure, business, and personal options that mobility offers) and the house (because of the likely-but-admittedly-not-guaranteed value appreciation, tax benefit, and leisure, business, and personal options that it offers). Now that I’ve done the math on the whole thing, I’d have definitely walked away from the dealership interest fee and bought a less popular car if need be. And I would probably have waited for my credit rating to get up to the standards that would have let me get the lower interest rate, though in actuality, that would have left me pretty fucked when the Honda broke down, it doesn’t make it any less of a good idea. Stay tuned for later when I go over the crazy finances of buying a house! Whoa, all the fun.

I love my car dearly, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea to do a full analysis of it from time to time.

I bought a Nissan Versa, by the way, after a series of worsening experiences at dealerships that left me thinking I would rather drive a tractor than deal with the idiots at the dealerships. Then the fantastic Jeff Williamson at Ron Tonkin Nissan went out of his way to provide great service and whatnot and some other bullshit and got me a car I wanted and got me financed without me having to stab him. It was great, and so is the car. I took it in for it’s first service Monday and now I’m good for another three months or some such whatnot. It gets like 33 miles to the gallon in town and I can chirp the tires if I try hard and am on level ground. It also has fantastic drunk-blinding high beams that really make driving Saturday nights a pleasure. I wish that it had auto-raise on the drivers window, as when I’ve used auto-lower to drop the window and spit on someone driving like a retard downtown, I want to be able to auto-raise it too, but that’s pretty much my only performance bitch.

I laughed and cheered while reading the very entertaining Ben Stein : How Not To Ruin Your Life installment about trying to purchase a Cadillac (very worth reading if you haven’t checked it out yet). I teased people I knew who were buying cars about how much fun they were going to have. Like the grasshopper to their abused but diligent ant (both Ben Stein and my sister successfully purchased vehicles), I played and was lazy all day - Not noticing as the days got shorter and greyer. Never paying attention to the fact that I would soon have to buy a car myself.

Then it happened: I realized I needed a car. So I started reading reviews and road tests and previews and checking insurance numbers and fiddling and farting and doing all those greatly annoying things you have to do in preparation for car shopping. And then on to the main event: Fucking Car Shopping.

My criteria for a car are simple: It must get decent gas mileage (average over or around 25mpg in mixed driving), it must have a manual transmission (anemic engines need a little bit more fine control over the power band to be anywhere near fun), and it must not offend me absolutely. Everything else I’m negotiable on. So I meandered and I checked, and I looked. And I started thinking that maybe a used car would hit the spot. Something in the 2-5 year old area, under a hundred thousand miles (preferrably something under seventy five thousand), and in the eight to eleven thousand dollar range. Moderately sporty would be nice, but the mileage trumps this, and my tastes tend to lean to the coupe and hatch range instead of the sedan and wagon end of things. I have been a Honda driver pretty religiously through my driving career, but their current lineup of cars is either way too expensive for what it is (Accord) or has been recently redesigned from interestingly sporty to Mercury Grand Marquis clone (Civic). So the old standby being out the window, I accepted that I would probably be buying a marque that I wasn’t familiar with.

After some fits and starts, I began to realize that most dealerships keep their used car inventory fairly up to date on their respective websites, and that made searching very easy, no need to drive around to a dozen places when I can pick the four cars I’m interested in and go take a look at them, right? So I go look at a Mitsubishi Lancer ES (Pretty sure it was an 05). Short Answer: Anemic, noisy on the road. But what really took the cake was the salesman. He was probably a little younger than me, say 25, obviously uncomfortable with people. Came over and asked me what I was looking for, and when I mentioned the Lancer, we walked over and he tried to open it up, but it was locked. He ran off to get the keys, and had almost nothing to say about the car. I told him I was really looking for a manual, and he almost ran off again, but I stopped him, and instead suggested we take the Lancer out. After trying to get in, he stops me, tells me that he’s going to back it out and to go stand off to the side. He backs out of a spot, and drives about 30 yards away and then waits there for us. Shaking my head, I wander over to where he’s waiting. He stutters something, I’m not even sure what it was, and I just assume it was “take the keys”. I hop in the front, my mom (who has been nice enough to join me on this hell-cruise), hops in the back, salesman hits the passenger side. We pull out into fairly unpleasant traffic, and he asks me if I live around here or know the area, and I say that I do, and he doesn’t seem to know how to respond to that. I wonder, quietly, if he would have had any way to follow that up if I said I wasn’t from the area. I aim to take the car up the road and down a residential area I know about so I can see if the suspension is OK (lots of speed humps and a fairly bad paving job), when he blurts out “TURN HERE”. Stunned, I did it, because I was convinced there was some kind of emergency vehicle following us or something. Looking back, I realize there is nothing wrong, and as I try to pass a truck on a very gentle hill (and the car decides it can only possibly do this in first gear at 6200 rpm), the salesman begins randomly poking at buttons, showcasing such features as the sunroof and the emergency blinkers. The very next street he is gesturing for me to turn and when it looks like I might not comply, he again yelps “TURN RIGHT HERE”. We get up to 40, at which point the din in the cab from the tires would impinge even the most raucous conversation. He begins to look distressed again, and begins turning on the stereo, which he turns up and begins asking me what station I want to listen to. I reached over to turn off the radio and it caused him such distress that he almost missed a “TURN HERE” which took us onto the next major street, at which point I had completely disengaged from the vehicle. “TURN HERE” and we were back at the dealership. He instructs me to park it just inside the lot and that he’ll take it back to it’s spot. He asks me how I liked the car, and I reply quite honestly that it was anemic, and that I didn’t like it. So I ask him to identify the cars on the lot that were manual transmission. He says he’ll be right back with the information, so he heads off and I begin to idly fondle some early 90s BMW in the lot. The salesman returns with, who I can only assume is “the closer”.

The Closer is covered in pancake makeup to “hide” a particularly bad skin condition around her lips and cheeks. She comes out, introduces herself, and asks what I’m looking for. I tell her I want a manual, and she begins walking around and looking into windows (very efficient). She then indicates two Kia sedans as manual transmission (both automatics), and mentions that almost nobody is making manual transmission cars anymore. She then points over at a late 90’s Camry or Maxima, and mentions that it’s a more powerful car than the Lancer I drove. I ask her if it’s a six cylinder, and she says she’ll go get the keys (I assume to pop the hood and count spark plug wires). After she leaves I notice the signs of a long dragging collision on the side and that’s enough, this car shopping experience is _done_.

I had test driven one car before this, a Scion xB at a Toyota dealership (Short answer: fun, kind of feminine), and I’m not sure if I just drove so erratically that the “TURN HERE” never started up, or that this Honda dealership was an abberation. I also thought that the level of service was pretty low, all of the salesfolks seemed a little miffed that I was there, making them walk out around the lot. I thought that the quality of service could only go up. Little did I know.