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In Robert Cialdini's Influence, he describes a scheme his brother used to pay his way through college. Basically, he'd buy a car at the bottom of its fair blue
by mistercow 13y ago
In Robert Cialdini's Influence, he describes a scheme his brother used to pay his way through college. Basically, he'd buy a car at the bottom of its fair blue book range, clean it up, and then place an ad for it at the top of its price range, with a well-worded ad, asking people to call for an appointment. The sneaky bit is that he'd then schedule all of the interested buyers for exactly the same time. They'd arrive minutes apart, but he'd only let them look at it on a first-come-first-serve basis, making the late-comers stand and wait. The pressure created by the competitive atmosphere would always ensure a sale.
If you combine this with the information in this article, you could potentially never pay for a car (or even major maintenance) again, and even make a profit in the long term.
1: Find a popular and reliable model of car that doesn't require any standard maintenance in the 25k-45k mile range other than oil changes.
2: Write some generic ad copy for this car. Make sure to research this and make sure you're advertising as effectively as possible.
4: Buy this car used, but in good condition, near the bottom of its price range and just over 30k miles.
5: When you hit 39k miles (if you're driving an average of 60 miles/day, this will be about 5 months), sell it using the scheme above. You've already got the ad copy; just tweak it to fit the specific car you have.
6: Goto 4.
- eru 13y agoThis scheme will probably work, and make you some money. In general, there's a word for doing work for money, it's called a job.
- mistercow 13y agoThat's true, but for the average person, it would be worthwhile, even with zero profit. According to my cursory internet research, the average US household spends 1.5% of their annual income on car repairs[0]. The average adult works 1,300 hours per year[1]. The average household has 2.1 adults[2]. So in a five month period, the average household puts about 17 hours into car maintenance. So if you live in an average household, you'll come out on top with this scheme as long as you spend less than 17 hours on the process each time. [0] http://auto.howstuffworks.com/under-the-hood/cost-of-car-ownership/auto-maintenance-cost.htm http://auto.howstuffworks.com/under-the-hood/cost-of-car-own... [1] http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-05-13/how-average-american-adult-spends-24-hours-each-day http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-05-13/how-average-america... [2] http://www.popcouncil.us/pdfs/wp/144.pdf http://www.popcouncil.us/pdfs/wp/144.pdf
- hippich 13y agothe only problem is - tax, which eats into yours, already small, profits; and if you continue to do this through the year - you definitely need to get a used car license with all prerequisites (i.e. parking lot, bond and bunch of other stuff which do not comes free) above assuming you want to stay legal.
- mistercow 13y agoThis seems to vary by state. In Colorado, for example, a dealer is someone who sells more than three cars per year with profit in mind. So as long as you're keeping each car for more than 4 months, it seems you'd be fine in Colorado. Georgia, on the other hand, defines it simply as selling for profit. So to comply with the law, you wouldn't be able to mark up the cars at all.
- TylerE 13y agoNo one sells cars at 30k anymore. They're either coming off lease, typically at 36k, or they're financed for 5 years or longer which means that they're more likely to be at least 60k before the owner even thinks of selling.
- mistercow 13y agoFirst of all, that's clearly refuted by the article itself. If nobody sold cars at 30k, they wouldn't have data for that mileage range. Secondly, you can see that it is untrue by going to any used car site and filtering by mileage. There are tons of cars available right at 30k miles.