A little life pro tip, force a dealership to negotiate with you over the phone. This takes away a lot of their leverage in person, and removes some of the FOMO of the moment from your psyche. You can also call around multiple different places and utilize the pricing and information in real time to negotiate better deals at other places, increasing your own leverage by using the dealerships against each other.
Anytime you strike a deal, tell them you will come in 1-2 days (whatever you choose) to pick up the car, that gives you more time to sleep on the decision and truly understand if it is the right financial decision for you before you actually pull the trigger. Remember, deposits are refundable!
Pro Tip – Negotiate with dealerships on the phone
byu/Healfezza inFrugal
Posted by Healfezza
6 Comments
Even better, negotiate via email
Most places will refuse to do this. There is a whole TikTok account of the guy calling dealerships to discuss prices and almost always they refuse unless he comes in person.
It’s a good tip – if it works.
Or use a service like Truecar or Costco’s car shopping services. But yes – when you do it over email, you’re likely dealing with a fleet manager who’s incentive is turnover, not necessarily the biggest margin on any one car like a sales drone you’d have to interact with if you were to just show up.
My last conventional car purchase was done entirely over email. When we arrived at the dealer it was more or less just figuring out what to do with the trade-in, and still had to sit through the “finance guy”, but it was one of the less painful finance guy experiences I remember. My most recent car purchase was a Tesla – which just really drove the point home for me that the whole dealer model can fudge right off.
ALSO learn about all the extra charges you can get them to take off that are unnecessary and go straight into their pockets.
Don’t believe that places like CarMax will not negotiate with you. I got a free $3000 5 yr/50,000 mile extended warranty by just walking out when they wouldn’t lower the price. It paid for itself with the first repair.
Truecar worked for us when we bought our truck.
This is how I do it. I submit a request online they followup and I negotiate over text with multiple dealers. Then I go in and close. This is very normal in 2020s.