With the new job I am now traveling a bit further than I’m used to. It’s not much further in miles, maybe an extra 5-8 miles, but unfortunately it’s on one of the heaviest corridors in the Twin Cities. I get to jet up and down Highway 169 every day. In the evenings it’s not unusual for me to spend a good 40 minutes in traffic.
Lucky for me we just finished paying off the truck. While I love the truck, it’s not great on a daily commute. It isn’t built to handle stop and go traffic. The brakes complain with every stop.
So this weekend we went car shopping. I had a fairly good idea what I wanted. I have wanted a Mazda 3 hatchback for awhile. We found a used one that met most of the criteria and were able to pick it up for a fairly decent price. It’s 2005 with 29k miles on it with a sunroof. The best part of it is the engine — Its quite snappy. It’s got a lot of “go” on it, or as Mazda would tell you “zoom, zoom”.
I had crunched all the numbers before we went shopping and I knew this one was within our price range. I knew that if I got a 5 year loan and an decent interest rate that I could get the car for $300 a month, I just needed to squeeze the price down by $1000. I’m not much of a haggler so I wasn’t too sure how it would go. But I figured if they didn’t want to sell me the car, then I would find somewhere else that would be willing to sell me it. While I was in love with the car, I wasn’t in love with the process.
Our sales lady was nice but she played the ditzy card too many times. I think it was in an attempt to get me to budge. She was a little put off by the fact that I had everything lined up. I knew about the 4 square and I knew what numbers they could play with. I gave her two outs, one of which i wish I hadn’t. They could either: 1. Drop the price by $1000 OR 2. Give me a stellar interest rate — well under the average rate for a used car. In the end her finance guy saved her by getting me an awesome interest rate. The price of the car was only dropped by $500. In the end, though, I got exactly what I wanted.
They did take 2 hours to come to the number which was the sucky part. Although this time I feel like I did my best. I don’t feel ripped off and I think both parties got something out of the deal. At one point Courtney looked at me and said, “Do you think they hate people like you?” I said, “Yes, yes they do.”
