Back at the beginning of the year, we decided to buy Suzy a new car. If I’d read The Total Money Makeover before Christmas, we likely would have bought a good used car instead, but that’s a discussion for another time. We bought a brand new Nissan Versa hatchback, very good on gas, very dependable, and the first new car that Suzy has ever owned.
We secured our financing ahead of time through Capital One online, so we didn’t need to get hosed on trading in our 10-year old pickup just to make a down payment. So we kept the truck to haul things around and clan out our storage buildings, and over the past few weeks have used it to carry stuff to the flea market.
Well, last weekend the truck started to overheat on the way home from the flea market, so this morning when we left the house at 6:15 AM, we barely made it to the interstate before it started to overheat again. We pulled off, aborted our Saturday flea market attempts, and came home to get a few more hours sleep. When I woke up, adding about 4 hours sleep to the 2 I logged last night, and decided to go ahead and do some repairs to the truck.
When we took it in for an oil change in February, we got an estimate to fix every little thing that was wrong with the truck, including a coolant leak that was going to be pricy to fix. Obviously now we have to get that fixed before we can sell the truck, because unless we get it running well, we’ll see a lot less on the sale.
I checked out kbb.com, the Kelly Blue Book website, and it lists the truck as worth about $3800 in private sale for a vehicle of that make and model with that many miles on it. As is, I think I’d be extremely lucky to get $1500 for it. I think if I can spend less than $1,000 for it, and hopefully get about $3,000 for the vehicle, then it will be worth the money we’re gonna spend getting it fixed.
There’s a simple formula in deciding whether or not to fix up a car that you want to sell. First you figure out what you thin you can get for the car as it sits. Then find out what it will cost to fix the vehicle up. Then find out what you think the vehicle is worth on great condition. Check the difference, and if the estimated sale price of the vehicle plus the repair costs is less than the sale price of the vehicle in great condition, then you’ll make more money fixing the vehicle than if you try to sell it as-is.
So I drove the vehicle (slowly) over to the AAA Car Care Center and they’re checking it out for me. I took it over there because we’re AAA members, and we get a 10% discount on all labor there. Hopefully it will run me less than $800, and we can move the truck quickly. We’re gonna dip into our slush fund a little to make these repairs, so I’d very much like to make this transaction happen quickly to be able to re-fund our emergency money before long.
So that’s a little formula to help you decide whether or not to fix up a junker or not. I’m still fine-tuning whether or not to make the repairs to my truck, but I’ll get the repair estimate on Monday and make my decision at that point. Right now, we have to figure out how to get all our flea market stuff up the highway tomorrow without the truck, so any furniture-moving plans will have to be put on hold until next week or later.
