Buying a second hand car........advice?

[williamssam81]

Hi Friends.

Some nice fellow has recently plowed into the back of my car while i was waiting at a red light. His car was a nice big SUV. My car, while functioning perfectly, is now considered a writeoff which is quite irritating.

As a result im starting to think about buying a new (well, second hand) car. I probably have a budget of 5g's which i know aint much, but yeah, quite poor atm. A mid 90s corolla is what comes to mind at the moment. The problem is, im not really experienced in this area as my last car was bought off a family friend.

Any of you guys ever gone private? Used car dealerships? Other? Had any luck with private? What things have you done to ensure the car aint going to fall apart? Yeah pretty much screwed without a car so i need to get the ball rolling on this kinda soon. Any help is very much appreciated.

[CE_BRENT]

Get a late eighties early nineties 5.0l Mustang. You can get a nice one for around $3000 and have money left over for one of our Power packages.

[Pyper6970]

You can always get an Early 90s Mustang with a 5.0 and upgrade that with some nice parts along the way. Cars are selling for cheap now with the economy the way it is, if you can find one for about 3k like Brent mentioned, then you can spend the remainder on parts. The rule of thumb to go by when purchasing a car is to plan on spending the price of the car in parts for service. If you bought Brand X car for 2500, expect to pay 2500 in parts to make it road worthy. I am talking brakes, servicing the fluids in the vehicle, fix an erroneous wiring or anything that looks shady, replace the battery with a new dependable one, change all the filters, and repair/replace engine components that are faulty. Change out the spark plugs, Re-use the wires dependent on corrosion, change out your distributor cap and rotor. Timing belt, water pump. If the car has an OBD readout, all the better. You can get a cheap one from Ebay and see what needs replacing and some provide an active display of what the engine is doing while driving maybe the O2 sensor needs replacing, etc..

I say all this because you want a dependable car, you dont want to change it all at once in one day because you create a lot of variables as to why it wont start...Little bit by little bit you install them through the course of a week in your spare time. The purpose is to make a car you wont have to think twice about. If you really need to go somewhere and something fails you will wish you took the week out of your schedule when you first bought it and taken care of the preventative maintenance.

As far as buying from family members, I wouldn't creates a bit of a tension when something goes bad. You dont wanna create a stink and feel jipped that you got screwed out of your cash. Private owners work well, look in your classifieds. I'd look on Craigslist locally, maybe ebay as well. If there is a local dealer on ebay that you can check the car out in person, and then look at his/her feedback thats even better so you know who you are dealing with.

Hope it all works out for you

Pete