My mom is getting a new car in the coming months, and is currently driving a 2003 Toyota Avalon. Should I sell my 2009 Nissan Sentra and take the Avalon?
Avalon:
86,000 miles
Leather seats
Sunroof
6 cylinder engine
Would need new stereo
In excellent shape - will be getting new brakes tomorrow
20 mpg
Sentra:
74,000 miles
4 cylinder engine
Superior cup holders
In good shape - new brakes and tires
Stained seats and paint damage
27 mpg
Both are completely paid off, both seem to be worth about $8000 on the open market.
I really, really want a sunroof…I sold my POS convertible a few years ago, and miss it, but I don’t want another full convertible.
Mint.com tells me I can buy a new car in 2017, which I intend to do.
Fancy, older model from a top brand vs. slightly newer, entry-level compact from a maybe lesser but still good brand.
You can’t really go wrong as far as cars go, but from your situation it sounds like the Sentra MPG is preferable, plus Avalon is a prestige car and you probably don’t “need” it. Re: gas, those numbers seem low. Is that city? Or did you measure it yourself (as stated mileage is often low)? Also, check what type of gas it needs. A quick google suggests 87 is fine so that might not matter.
Finally, there is the benefit of avoiding the pain in the ass of selling it.
I have a sunroof (or moonroof? The better one anyway). I use it about 1x every 3 years. They lose their draw for me, YMMV.
Assuming by selling the Sentra you mean trying to list it privately and get something close to the private party bluebook price, that may be a lot easier said than done. At $8k, most buyers are going to need financing and while it’s perfectly possible to do a private party sale with financing, it’s often a hassle. I wouldn’t really expect either of those cars to be especially fast sellers either, particularly the Sentra since there’s plenty of nice newish ones on the used market thanks to their popularity as rentals.
Is the list them both and keep the one that doesn’t sell trick an option? That would at least double your chances of making a quick sale.
You kind of buried the lead there. Pizza delivery is brutal on cars and gas price and consumption are brutal on driver profits. If it’s strictly an either/or proposition, keep the Nissan. If your mom is offering the Toyota as a no-strings gift, I would personally do what I could to maintain the Nissan as a work vehicle and the Toyota as a personal use vehicle.
What I would not do, under any circumstances, is give up the newer (but more beat-up) Nissan in favor of the older (but nicer, with worse gas mileage) Toyota unless your job situation is likely to change in the fairly near future. I also wouldn’t ever consider a new vehicle purchase for pizza delivery work. MPG is important, but wear and tear is brutal and there is no way to hustle in the pizza logistics industry without beating on your vehicle. This is not theoretical for me, I lived it and regret my vehicle decisions to this day.
Absent the pizza delivery job, I would trade the Sentra for the Avalon without a second thought.
Disagree. Private party sale is always understood to be cash equivalent. However the buyer gets the cash is up to them, but it’s understood and there is no shortage of private party sales in this price range and much higher. You may have to deal with a few dreamers, but this is as true of $2000 car buyers as much (probably more so) as it is of $8000+ car buyers.
Huh? A private party sale is understood to mean exactly what it sounds like: it’s a car sold by a private individual instead of a licensed dealer. That includes when the buyer gets a used car loan through a bank to buy the car, which is the case in most higher dollar private party deals.
If you buy a car off a lot with a used car loan from your bank, you can basically get pre-approved and once you pick out a car the lot and the bank work everything out that needs to get worked out. It’s obviously even easier if you’re financing through the lot itself. If you’re buying private party, though, you have to do the legwork to collect all the information needed to confirm the collateral value of the car and then arrange the title exchange and finally the transfer of funds to the seller. It’s not super complicated or anything, but it’s a lot of extra work for the buyer and makes things slightly more complex for the seller. It’s not like the bank just gives the buyer a pile of money to go out and buy a car exactly as if he’d pulled it out of his checking account
My point isn’t that you’ll never sell a high dollar car private party since, yeah, it obviously happens all the time, but it takes longer. Both in the sense of the actual transaction takes longer and that it takes longer for a buyer to come along because there’s fewer buyers that have enough cash on hand or are willing to deal with the hassle of financing.
I agree with the majority - keep the Sentra. It’s newer, has fewer miles, and gets much better mileage. You’ll likely need to spend a lot more on maintenance and repairs over the next few years if you go for the Avalon.
If the Avalon is a gift to you from your mother (as someone suggested earlier), I would sell it and put the money in savings towards your next car - if you can add a bit of money to that fund each month as well, you may not even need finance for your next car if you don’t mind buying used.
The avalon is not a prize Toyota/Lexu to possess.
It is plain , suffers poor steering alightmnent and other design issues,
and is boring, and not particularly solidly built. Its due to fall apart at the seams bout now . Engine is from Camry and benefits from the long life of the Camry models, but nothing else is.
I assumed that whichever car I didn’t keep would go as a trade-in for the new car mom is purchasing. Private sale would definitely be a pain in the ass, even for more money.
I hear you, bro.
I doubt she’d be THAT generous, but yeah, my plan is to buy cash or at least have a loan of less than 10K.
Convincing, and somewhat poetic!
Thanks again everyone. I will keep my reliable little car, and keep dreaming.
Yeah, I get all that. The overall point is, private party sale means first agreeable money wins. If the buyer has to jump through hoops, that’s their problem and they’re in a race to beat other buyers.
You positioned it as an $8000 used car sale will most likely require used car financing through a bank or credit union that is a potential time sink for a seller. In my experience, that’s a problem at the dealer level, not private party sales. Private used car buyers generally buy at the price point they can pay in cash equivalent and are completely financed with cash equivalent before they start shopping. By cash equivalent, I mean a stack of $100 bills or ready to meet you at their bank the next day while you watch them draw a certified check with your name on it and hand it over.
It’s never been an obstacle for me as a private seller and I’ve never traded in a car. If your experience has been different, I don’t know what to say. We’ve had different experiences, I guess. Here is your initial statement again:
My opinion and first hand experience are at complete odds with your supposition and that’s why I disagree with your statement. Buyers are not a hassle. Tire kickers and low-ballers are a hassle. THAT is the the price you pay for selling private party for more money than you trade-in for. Dealing with dreamers. Tire kickers and low-ballers. My secondary point was that this is often more of an issue when selling $2-3k cars than it is with more expensive ones. YES, selling it yourself requires work. More work is more hassle, by definition. That’s why you get more money than trading-in.
Claiming that this extra work is a product of the need for buyer financing for private party sale is just wrong. That’s why I called you out on it.
It could be a regional difference or something, but this does not agree with my experience as a frequent wheeler n’ dealer of cars. Unless they’re hugely discounted from what they’re worth, cars that are expensive enough to likely require financing simply don’t sell quickly. Having been on the buyer end of a couple of bank-financed private party transactions, I very much believe that this is partly because of a smaller buyer pool due to the difficulty in dealing with the financing.
The last time I did this, there was probably about a week between me walking into the bank and saying “hey, I’m thinking about buying a truck” and them getting the pre-approval in order and another week between me contacting the seller, test driving it, and the bank being sufficiently satisfied to release the funds. I’m fine dealing with that, but then I like the whole car buying process. For most people who think buying a car is an odious chore, adding a whole bunch of extra work isn’t going to fly. Plus during that entire time, I’m sure the seller was always a little worried I was just jerking him around.
The tire kicker issue perhaps isn’t as acute as it might be with a really cheap car, but because the thing stays for sale longer I have to deal with a hell of a lot more of them. It’s sort of a signal-to-noise issue. Furthermore, you get a lot more of the “funding fell through” variety of flakes, which are usually more of a time commitment than the “will you take $600?” variety.
Granted, now that I think about it, $8k might still be cheap enough these days that this isn’t much of an issue, but once you get close to the five digit range, it definitely is IME.
without beating on your vehicle. This is not theoretical for me, I lived it and regret my vehicle decisions to this day.