A used Hyundai could be a sleeper deal, assuming you get the right year. They were known for being bad cars, but Hyundai has really upped their quality in the last, what, 8 years?, but they don’t hold their resale value like Toyotas and Hondas do because people still think of them as poor quality cars.
Good choices except for the Passat. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice car to drive, but repair costs are sky high. In addition, there is a known issue with oil starvation and sludge building up in the lower part of the engine. The dealers are balking at fixing them for original owners with all the oil change paperwork, I imagine a second owner would be out of luck.
Now that SAAB has gone bankrupt, the already tenuous availability of parts and service is even more questionable. Even though this tends to lower the prices, I wouldn’t recommend getting one.
You basically hit the beater car lottery by hitting a deer. Make an insurance claim on it, it will be totaled for sure and they’ll cut you a check for $1000 without batting an eye. This will negligibly affect your insurance premiums and that money can be applied to a new car purchase.
As has been noted, the used car market is not a great place right now. Everyone has caught onto the idea that used cars are a bargain and now they are painfully over priced and the financing options on them are bordering on usury. If you really are the type of person to keep a car for 20 years you absolutely should buy new in this market. The payments will be low, the interest rate will be nearly nonexistent and there’s no better maintenance history than “none”. Plus, the fuel economy, reliability, safety and amenities in cars today so far outstrip something made just 8 years ago that it’s comical. There perhaps has never been a better time to be in the market for a new car.
Personally if I were you I’d gather up your $1000 from the insurance company and the $3000 you’re considering on spending on a used Camry and go to the nearest Hyundai, Ford, Chevy or Kia dealer. The Cruze is an amazing vehicle as is the Elantra. The whole American reliability thing is a thing of the past and currently Hondas and Toyotas are badly trailing the pack. The cars they are selling are either badly out of date, suffering from numerous recalls or cratering off the initial quality charts. No new model has disappointed as much as the Civic this year with the possible exception of the Jetta.
If you do start thinking about buying a new car, I’d like to put in a plug for the 2012 Ford Mustang. We bought one last June, and it’s about as much fun as you can have with a car under $30,000.
I don’t have the credit or income to finance a new car. Gonna have to go used. 
That’s a shame, because you’re going to badly overpay for someone else’s problems. The buy “grandma’s Buick” days of used car shopping is over. People hold onto cars forever these days and only part with them when they know a big repair bill is looming, just like you are planning. You can rarely get lucky and find a cheap, quality used car if you’re in the perfect place at the right time, but it’s exceedingly uncommon. The internet has made it very easy to accurately price a used car and there’s entire industries built around flipping them for resale. If a car pops up on Craigslist below market a used car dealer will swoop in and buy it up and put it on his lot.
When you combine the influence of the internet and crowd sourced prices with the bad economy, cash for clunkers, general reliability of mid-90s to mid-00s cars you’re fighting a very uphill battle in which bargains are very tough to find. Visit a new car dealer these days and the used trade-ins on their lots are liable to only be priced 35% off of the new car’s sticker. There’s a dealer I pass on the way home from work every day who has 5-7 year old used cars on his lots and almost all of them are marked between $20 and $28k. Granted a fair share of them are German imports, but many are Camrys, Altimas and Malibus.
Yep.
Unless you have a freind who is selling theirs, which may also cause problems.
You can pick up a clean early 2000s Subaru Impreza for $5k, and it will be 4WD (they only come that way). Personally, unless you live someplace where it snows, I’d give it a miss; 4WD is just one more thing to go wrong.
As I say, buying an “unpoplar” car model can save you a lot of money.
For example, the last new car we bought was a Saturn. It cost $2700 less than a comparable Toyota, and cost much less for the factory service.
In addition, it cost us about $200 less per year to insure (because car thieves target Toyotas and ignore Saturns).
Resale value was not an issue, as we drive the car into the ground.
There are a lot of sed cars of unpopulkar makes/models that can give you good service at low cost.
But it usually doesn’t.
A Subie of that vintage will provide mostly trouble-free driving. That is, until the head gasket blows at the 100K-150K mile mark. And it will happen, even if you drive like a little old lady. The 2.5 liter EJ25 engines found in Subies from the early 2000s are notorious for gasket problems.
When you’re researching 10 year old cars, you’ll find that there’s often one fatal flaw that sours the deal. I was considering buying an early 2000s Volvo X70, until I fount out their transmissions are notorious for dying around 120K. $4000. Saab 9-3? Lose the keys, and it’s a thousand bucks to replace the immobilizer system to get your car running again.