How-to-Buy-a-Quality-Used-Car-Fast
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00:00:31.500 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,
00:00:34.440 | skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while
00:00:38.860 | building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Josh Rasheeds. I'm
00:00:43.000 | your host. Today, I'm going to talk to you about how to get a hopefully high-quality
00:00:48.380 | used car fast and cheap. I'm going to share with you something I have learned. I'm not
00:00:55.940 | a professional, but I have bought and sold quite a few cars now. I haven't totaled up
00:01:00.360 | the number, but it's certainly at least 12, 15, probably closer to 20, I don't know, just
00:01:06.520 | for my own personal use. I've had some winners, had some losers, but along the way, I've gained
00:01:10.920 | some experience. I want to share that with you because you might use this knowledge in
00:01:16.220 | a variety of different circumstances. You might need it now to get a deal on a good
00:01:22.100 | quality used car for yourself and for your family. You might use it in the future when
00:01:27.460 | you need to just buy a car all of a sudden, or you might do what I'm doing, which was
00:01:31.400 | show up in Portugal and try to buy a low-priced but high-quality used car fast. I'm going
00:01:38.020 | to tell you how I have done it. I don't yet know if the car that I bought is high-quality.
00:01:45.200 | I believe that it is, but if it turns out not to be, I'll let you know. It's always
00:01:48.380 | a risk, but I'll tell you how I did it fast and how I go about the process of doing it.
00:01:54.580 | In the next show in this series, I'll tell you why I came to Portugal. Put quite simply,
00:02:00.220 | I wanted to buy a car in Europe, and Portugal was the first country that I figured out would
00:02:06.220 | allow me to buy a car, register it, and insure it on the European continent. I figured, "Hey,
00:02:12.580 | once I get the car, I can drive wherever I want, anywhere from literally Europe, Asia,
00:02:16.660 | and Africa," but I didn't want to deal with trying to ship a car from the United States
00:02:20.600 | or some other place to another country or another continent. That's tricky. I've done
00:02:26.020 | it, but it's tricky. Let's talk about the process. To begin with, one of the things
00:02:33.320 | that you want to make sure that you understand is what your minimum requirements are for
00:02:39.100 | a vehicle. Your minimum requirements can be whatever you decide that they are, but you
00:02:44.100 | want to get a sense of, "What do I absolutely want and need in a vehicle?" These things
00:02:49.140 | will change over time. Your minimum requirements might be, "That vehicle needs to be able
00:02:55.580 | to take me from point A to point B." Fine. If you need to take one person from point
00:03:01.300 | A to point B, that's something that can be done very quickly. In my case, my minimum
00:03:06.340 | requirements have more to do with seating and cargo capacity. I need six belted seats,
00:03:13.540 | at least, and I need, at the moment, some cargo capacity. It doesn't need to be huge,
00:03:18.820 | but I need some cargo capacity. Then I specified a basic level of comfort. I was looking for
00:03:26.320 | something that would have a basic level of comfort. I need air conditioning, functional
00:03:30.700 | air conditioning throughout the whole car. The biggest thing there is we do a lot of,
00:03:36.780 | when you're traveling, like we're traveling, you wind up doing quite a few long days on
00:03:40.340 | the road. Long days on the road with the windows open, with a car full of people, are very,
00:03:47.140 | very tiring. I remember the first time I rode a motorcycle, I rode a Harley from West Palm
00:03:52.820 | Beach to Key West. Then we were headed back from Key West to West Palm Beach. It's about,
00:03:57.660 | I don't know, four and a half, five hour road. I remember so vividly, it took us all day
00:04:02.380 | riding, a few stops here and there, but it was hot, it was sunny. I remember so vividly
00:04:07.560 | getting off the motorcycles, 10 o'clock at night, got to our destination in West Palm
00:04:11.380 | Beach, got off the motorcycle, and I looked at my riding partner, and I just said, "I
00:04:15.780 | am wiped out. I was exhausted." You say, "Why are you exhausted from sitting on the motorcycle?"
00:04:24.340 | You're not working, but the sun, the wind, the heat, everything exhausts you. It just
00:04:29.980 | made me so grateful to live when we live versus years ago of being a Pony Express rider or
00:04:36.700 | a cowboy, somebody going across the plains in a stagecoach where it's hot and it's loud.
00:04:45.060 | It's exhausting. That is exhausting. The same thing happens with car travel. While I enjoy
00:04:51.220 | rolling my windows down and taking a short trip, if you're actually on the road all day
00:04:58.580 | with your windows down because you don't have functional air conditioning, it's exhausting.
00:05:02.660 | One time, my wife and I, we had a few young children, and we were in Orlando. While we
00:05:08.220 | were in Orlando, the air conditioning in our minivan stopped working. We just had to do
00:05:15.540 | a fairly short and easy drive. It's about two hours from Orlando back to West Palm Beach
00:05:19.780 | where we were living at the time. We had either two or three babies in the car. I can't remember.
00:05:25.980 | I was genuinely concerned about them potentially suffering heat stroke to the point where we
00:05:32.580 | stopped several times to stop and get cool drinks, go in the air conditioning in the
00:05:36.300 | service plazas. While we're going down the road, I'm literally pouring water on them
00:05:42.460 | so that there would be some evaporative cooling for them and also on myself where I'm getting
00:05:48.460 | my clothes wet and the children's clothes wet so they would be able to enjoy some evaporative
00:05:52.020 | cooling. With little ones especially, heat is a major concern. One of my minimum requirements
00:05:58.020 | was air conditioning. Yours might be heat. You may need a functional heater. Think through
00:06:02.820 | what your minimum requirements are. You might have certain minimum requirements with regard
00:06:07.220 | to things like safety. I think this is a reasonable thing to consider. You might say, "I don't
00:06:12.780 | want a vehicle that is poorly rated in crash safety ratings. I need to make sure that I
00:06:19.580 | have a certain thing there." You might have a requirement for a certain kind of fuel.
00:06:23.980 | I want a gasoline vehicle. I want a diesel vehicle. You might have a requirement for
00:06:27.860 | an automatic transmission or a requirement for a manual transmission. You might have
00:06:32.860 | a requirement for a certain age of car. Some jobs will give you a stipend for a car, but
00:06:39.220 | each car has to be newer than a certain age. Or you might want a car that has a certain
00:06:45.460 | appeal, a certain sense of flash. I think while it used to be I would have said, "It
00:06:50.500 | doesn't matter what kind of car you drive." When I was younger and I was hyper frugal
00:06:54.620 | and just be like, "Drive whatever you want." I no longer believe that. People are going
00:06:58.240 | to judge you based upon your car. It doesn't matter whether they should judge you or they
00:07:03.140 | shouldn't judge you. The fact that they are going to judge you means that you need to
00:07:07.740 | take it into consideration. You're free to be the kind of person who says, "They're
00:07:11.220 | going to judge me by my car and they're going to judge me wrong." But you have to understand
00:07:14.900 | that you're going to have certain results that come from what you choose to do and the
00:07:21.580 | image that you choose to portray in the world about the kind of car that you drive. You
00:07:25.900 | might want to think through what those requirements are. Make, to the extent possible, a list
00:07:31.260 | of what requirements you have. Since I'm going to give advice in the context of what I've
00:07:36.780 | done recently, my personal requirements are very simple. I needed a car that was big enough,
00:07:42.700 | which means six seats minimum, six belted seats, comfortable enough, meaning air conditioning
00:07:50.560 | function and able to at least be comfortable, have enough space that the children are going
00:07:55.100 | to be okay. I needed it to have enough space for baggage. It didn't need to be too big.
00:07:59.420 | We don't have a ton of baggage, but enough space to be baggage. The kind of car that
00:08:03.020 | I will be content to own for a few months to travel around Europe. That was basically
00:08:08.740 | the vision. Then, to the degree possible, try to get a sense of what your price range
00:08:15.900 | would be before you ever start looking at cars. In my case, the price range that I decided
00:08:23.060 | I wanted to spend was somewhere between three to six thousand dollars. In Euros, somewhere
00:08:31.860 | three to five thousand Euros. Somewhere in that range. Let me explain how I got there
00:08:37.820 | for me personally. I certainly could buy a more expensive car. In the course of my lifetime,
00:08:45.960 | I have purchased many high quality serviceable cars in the five thousand dollar range in
00:08:52.700 | the United States. I think you can get a high quality, very functional vehicle in that three,
00:08:57.900 | four, five thousand dollar range in the United States, where the used car market is quite
00:09:03.640 | flush with vehicles. I would probably do that again, although at this point in time, I'm
00:09:11.020 | not as broke as I once was. The purchase of a car doesn't make much of a difference in
00:09:16.140 | my financial life. It makes a lot more sense for me just to have something that is a little
00:09:21.700 | bit nicer, a little bit newer, because it's nice to have those little technical things
00:09:25.780 | that you like, the technological things that I enjoy more and more, the active safety features.
00:09:31.100 | You don't get those on the three to five thousand dollar cars at this point. You get those on
00:09:35.540 | twelve to twenty thousand dollar cars. I like the active safety features. Some of them,
00:09:40.300 | I think, are well worth having and I appreciate investing in the safety. But my thinking here
00:09:46.260 | in Europe was I want to have a throwaway car. I didn't know if I'd be able to buy a car
00:09:52.060 | and I didn't know if I'd be able to buy a car and actually succeed in registering it.
00:09:57.860 | My research indicated to me that I could, but I wasn't sure about it. Number two, I
00:10:02.820 | don't know how long I'm going to use it might be for two months and then my visa runs out
00:10:08.740 | and I have to leave. It might be for two years. And so my idea was I want a car that is a
00:10:17.660 | low enough amount of money that I basically mentally can walk away from it. I want to
00:10:24.020 | mentally have the ability to say even if this car's terminal value is zero, it breaks down
00:10:30.940 | on me. I leave it on the side of the road. I call a taxi and take a taxi to the airport
00:10:35.740 | and fly out of the country and I don't even bother disposing of it properly. I'm okay
00:10:40.500 | doing that. That was my goal. Now, how did I arrive at the number then? I looked at the
00:10:45.020 | rental costs and the comparable rental costs on a vehicle varied. If I rent a minivan or
00:10:53.260 | seven seat SUV from a mainstream rental program like Hertz or Avis or any of the other more
00:11:01.120 | European brands, that price range would basically run me somewhere in the range of about $800
00:11:07.420 | a week. That's kind of the number, the working number that I have in my head, $800 a week.
00:11:11.840 | So at $800 a week, four weeks a month, we're quickly in the range of $3,000 a month. Interestingly,
00:11:18.980 | when you start researching this subject, there are a number of European manufacturers that
00:11:26.420 | have some interesting leasing programs for people to buy cars and use them in Europe.
00:11:33.940 | Because of the difficulty of buying and registering and insuring your own vehicle in Europe, some
00:11:38.280 | of the auto manufacturers have a policy. So for example, Renault or Citroen have policies
00:11:43.520 | where you can basically drive a brand new vehicle of theirs and it's basically a three-month
00:11:49.100 | lease. Although I don't remember the exact numbers at the moment, when I first researched
00:11:53.700 | those, I came out with a price range of a couple thousand dollars a month, which is
00:11:57.580 | cheaper than the weekly or week-to-week rentals, but it's still not throwaway money. And so
00:12:03.020 | I thought, well, if I could spend something like, I'll use euros, three to 5,000 euros
00:12:08.420 | on a car, then in a worst case scenario, I walk away from the money completely. Let's
00:12:15.060 | say I'm into it for 5,000 euros. Well, if I kept the car for a few months, at least
00:12:18.780 | I'm a little bit ahead there financially. It's unlikely, very unlikely that I would
00:12:24.380 | throw a car away that I spent 5,000 euros on. Very unlikely. What is more likely is
00:12:31.660 | I would decide to end my trip and I would need to sell the car in one week. And so how
00:12:38.980 | to, what kind of car would I have to have and what kind of price would I need to put
00:12:42.900 | on it in order for me to sell it quickly? The fire sale price. And I think this is helpful
00:12:48.460 | when you purchase any kind of physical asset is you should have what you might consider
00:12:53.800 | the true market value. If I shine this thing up, list it, advertise it in all the right
00:12:59.220 | places and really get a good response, here's how much I could sell it for. And then there's
00:13:03.980 | the fire sale price, the price that I put this on the market and it's gone by tomorrow
00:13:07.500 | morning because the first buyer comes along, sees the value in it, boom, goes on his way.
00:13:11.700 | So this is the, this is the, the, the way I calculate the numbers. So I figure, all
00:13:16.780 | right, if I buy a car for 5,000 euros, maybe the fire sale price is 3,000 euros. I'm out
00:13:22.380 | to that two grand, uh, two grand. If that's amortized out over two months, now I'm at
00:13:28.460 | a thousand bucks a month. Okay. I can take that. Uh, maybe I'm out over four months.
00:13:32.660 | I'm at now I'm at four, $500 a month makes even better. And so even if I did suffer that
00:13:38.660 | loss, then I'm good to go. And so I tried to consider what the price range would be
00:13:46.020 | and how much I would be willing to lose. That was how I picked it. And so now we get to
00:13:49.700 | shopping. So the first thing to remember is that shopping is free and we are living in
00:13:55.100 | a golden age of shopping. You'll notice I use this phrase quite a lot because I am convinced
00:14:00.380 | it's true on almost any factor I look at. I used to be a sentimentalist for previous
00:14:08.540 | eras. I no longer am. I'm glad to live in the year that I live in. There's no year I
00:14:12.700 | would rather live in than where, when we're living right now. Uh, and I genuinely believe
00:14:17.500 | that, uh, fully and completely. And so we live in a golden age of shopping and it's
00:14:22.340 | free to shop. And what I believe is the most useful tool for a consumer to use when it
00:14:29.900 | comes to shopping for a car is Facebook marketplace. Facebook marketplace has the benefit of being
00:14:39.320 | globally ubiquitous. It's not the most popular website in every country. Every country has
00:14:48.660 | its own brand that is more popular. It might be, um, you know, well, the Canadians Kijiji,
00:14:57.900 | right? Um, or Craigslist in some places for certain kinds of things. It might be, um,
00:15:05.500 | you know, every country has its own, its own local site and you can work in the local site
00:15:10.820 | if you want to. But, uh, and that's fine. That's good. But what Facebook is nice for
00:15:16.420 | is Facebook gives you one global brand where there's increasing amounts of inventory of
00:15:21.820 | whatever you would want to buy that you can search and have an a centralized communication
00:15:26.700 | place that's pretty good and pretty safe. And so what I'll do on Facebook is I'll go
00:15:32.300 | to a certain place. This is what I did in Europe. I was looking at campers. I thought
00:15:36.260 | about buying an RV in campers. So I go to Germany, uh, and I set a 500 kilometer radius
00:15:41.980 | around, um, you know, Munich. And then I figure out, okay, what is the, I try to figure out
00:15:47.820 | what's the word that is, what's the German word for camper. And I searched for that,
00:15:53.300 | uh, or, or I, you know, I repeat this process. And so when I figured out, okay, I think I
00:15:59.180 | might be able to buy a car in Portugal. Then I quickly said, let me go to Portugal and
00:16:05.220 | on Facebook and figure out what kind of inventory is available and see is my goal of spending
00:16:10.740 | three or $4,000 on a car. Can I get something for that? Or our car is more expensive or
00:16:15.880 | less expensive than that. And so I'd go to the, I would use Facebook marketplace, navigate
00:16:20.840 | to my target geography. I'd usually use Lisbon, put in a reason, you know, a hundred kilometers
00:16:26.740 | around Lisbon, something like that, and start looking for vehicles and start sorting for
00:16:31.780 | vehicles. And the key here is you want to train your Facebook algorithm to deliver to
00:16:37.660 | you the kind of vehicles that you're looking for. And so in my case, I started by searching
00:16:43.340 | for a van and I found a model of van. Cause of course, some models of van, uh, would be
00:16:49.860 | makes and models that I'm familiar with. And some are not, there's a whole different set
00:16:52.980 | of vehicles available in Europe versus North America versus every country. And so I figure
00:16:58.940 | out a model, I look at it and then I start searching for that model. Uh, so I don't know
00:17:05.100 | what the first one was, but it was probably something like a Renault Espace, right? Renault
00:17:09.540 | Espace is a seven seat, um, MPV, a people carrier. And so it's the kind of thing that's
00:17:16.340 | big enough that would be good. Minivans as far as the minivan brands are not pop that
00:17:22.500 | I'm most accustomed to in North America, not popular here in Europe. I have yet to see
00:17:26.220 | a single Kia Sedona or a single Honda Odyssey or a single, uh, Toyota Sienna on the road.
00:17:34.140 | These are not, these minivans not popular, but they do have a whole different set of
00:17:38.220 | people movers or MPVs that they use here. And so you try to figure out, okay, what's
00:17:42.620 | the brand that I'm targeting? And then you start saving, uh, certain listings. And then
00:17:47.780 | as you're saving and looking at those listings, look at what's recommended. And so the Facebook
00:17:53.340 | algorithm will start serving up cars to you that are similar to what you start saving.
00:17:58.240 | And so it starts giving you more brands, right? I quickly learned just from Facebook that,
00:18:02.060 | oh, Volkswagen has a car called, I think it's a Sharam, uh, I'm blanking on it at the moment
00:18:07.860 | as I record this, but I think it was a Volkswagen Sharan. It's a seven seat minivan basically.
00:18:12.740 | And oh, look, here's this other brand. There's also the Citroen, uh, C4 is another seven
00:18:18.900 | seat vehicle that could work. And, and little by little, your, your, your thing starts to
00:18:24.420 | be trained. Then I would also search by seat. So I know that the seating configurations,
00:18:30.220 | a lot of times are nine seats. I figured out, uh, what, what are the, you look at the ads
00:18:35.020 | and you figure out what are the words that are written in the ads. So in Portuguese,
00:18:38.420 | um, then they would put, you know, seven seats, say to me, how to say it in Portuguese, say
00:18:43.300 | to Lugares. And so they put seven seats and you say, okay, there's a seven seat. So you
00:18:47.260 | search for that and it gives you a whole listing of pages. So you click save, click, save,
00:18:51.780 | click, save, read the, read, read the descriptions, get a sense, look at the pictures, get a sense
00:18:55.560 | of what's available. Or you search for nine seats and okay, here are all the nine seats,
00:19:00.340 | right? The Renault traffic or the, the Mercedes Vito. Uh, and I didn't know any of these vehicles
00:19:06.500 | before I started doing this, but I learned quickly learned the makes and the models that
00:19:09.940 | work and you figure out what's available in that place. Now, ideally you want to do this
00:19:15.120 | when you have time. And so I started this process a couple of months ago, just browsing
00:19:18.680 | around different parts of Europe, looking at all the different things that are available
00:19:22.040 | on Facebook, shopping, getting a sense of what my money will buy. And so that can figure
00:19:26.680 | out if my budgets are accurate. Can I afford this thing that I want to do? Uh, what could
00:19:30.920 | I get for my money? What are the sense of prices? And then when you go to Facebook marketplace
00:19:36.840 | every day, the algorithm will serve you up your recommended listings. And so basically
00:19:41.680 | after a few days of training it every day, you'll see new, new vehicles that you're interested
00:19:46.400 | in. You click on those, get a sense of what's available and kind of move on. So that was
00:19:51.140 | how I did most of my shopping is with simply with Facebook marketplace. I did not contact
00:19:57.360 | anybody yet. I have found that to be kind of a really silly use of time, uh, until I'm
00:20:03.160 | ready to actually buy. I didn't contact anybody. I just simply saved listings and I knew that
00:20:09.760 | there is an abundant inventory of the kind of vehicle that I'm looking for available
00:20:16.320 | in the price range that I am willing to spend. And that's your key is to get a sense of what's
00:20:21.460 | available. What's difficult. You can get some information from ads. You can start to see,
00:20:27.240 | Oh look, this vehicle looks nicer. That vehicle doesn't look so nice. You can get a sense
00:20:31.280 | of here. This one's priced at this. If you're a really good shopper, you can look at previous
00:20:36.720 | auctions and say, Oh, this one sold at this price. I don't, I didn't choose to allocate
00:20:42.200 | the time to that. I didn't see that. That's a useful thing to know. I don't need with
00:20:45.960 | a three to $5,000 decision. I don't need to spend hours and hours and hours on it. I just
00:20:51.520 | need to get a sense that something is available and I need to train the algorithm. So then
00:20:56.320 | the final phase, what I did was you decide I'm ready to buy. And so ideally you need
00:21:00.600 | to have of course money in a transactions like this. You, in my opinion, always deal
00:21:06.080 | in cash, a little tricky in Europe, right? There's anti-cash laws in many parts of Europe
00:21:11.040 | where there's limits and the Europeans are pretty opposed to cash at this point. It's
00:21:16.720 | very different than, than, I mean, every country has kind of its own culture around cash, but
00:21:21.360 | I still think that in most circumstances, cash is the best for this, this price range.
00:21:27.560 | If you were searching for a $15,000 car, I think the Europeans would be pretty nervous.
00:21:32.040 | A $30,000 car certainly that, you know, they'd want to deal in, in bank transfers and such,
00:21:36.920 | but at this price range, you can easily deal in cash. And so you have your money ready
00:21:41.360 | and in used car buying cash is the way to go, especially in a North American audience.
00:21:48.760 | You want to make sure you deal in cash because cash will allow you many times to simply get
00:21:55.240 | a better deal. When somebody has had their car for sale for a few weeks and they got
00:22:00.200 | a guy that shows up, comes and looks at it and the auction was, or the listing was for
00:22:05.320 | $5,000 and he says, listen, you know, you could probably sell this for 5,000 to someone
00:22:12.520 | else, but I'd be happy to give you 4,000 for it. And I got the cash right here. That speaks
00:22:18.800 | when somebody wants cash. Now there's lots of people who don't have any need to sell.
00:22:22.240 | And I said, no, thanks. I'll just hold out for my thousand dollars, but you can get 20%
00:22:26.840 | discount there, right there. And I think that in just about any city you could plop, I don't
00:22:31.320 | know, I feel like pretty confident that if you put a video camera on me, you could pop
00:22:34.400 | me down in any, any city and I could get a 20% discount on a car when you're dealing
00:22:39.200 | just in cash and in the used market like that, it just simply works. And cash is so fungible
00:22:45.640 | that people love it. So back to my story of how I looked for it. The key here is using
00:22:51.040 | Facebook marketplace as a tool and training the algorithm. That's the benefit that what
00:22:56.400 | fell at fate. That's the benefit of what Facebook has that many of the other listing sites don't
00:23:01.360 | have. Craigslist requires you to go to the site and search each day for the specific
00:23:09.400 | term that you want to search for. The benefit of that is it's not that difficult to eventually
00:23:14.800 | find the complete inventory of what's listed on Craigslist. And the same thing with, you
00:23:20.120 | know, in Quentra 24 or, you know, whatever local site you find, Kijiji or, you know,
00:23:28.120 | whatever it is that you find that's available to you, then you have to search them. But
00:23:32.880 | what Facebook does and also offer up what these sites do is they train the algorithm.
00:23:37.640 | So you got to do is pop it open and there is a bunch of new fresh listings that the
00:23:42.280 | algorithm thinks will be of interest to you. And they're usually right. They're usually
00:23:45.760 | pretty good. So I flew into Portugal on Sunday and that was when I started making calls.
00:23:53.620 | Because the other thing about Facebook communication is and in any of this kind of communication,
00:23:58.760 | you can't schedule things in advance. At this point in time, maybe there are still cultures,
00:24:04.920 | meaning whole countries of people who are good at keeping calendars. But in my experience,
00:24:11.400 | there's in this kind of marketplace, you've got shifty people who can't keep an appointment
00:24:16.360 | to save their life. You're just going to have to wing it. And so I arrived in Portugal on
00:24:21.480 | Sunday around noon and then got my family all settled in, grabbed a phone at Sunday
00:24:26.120 | at three o'clock. And that was when I started sending messages. And so what I did was I
00:24:30.120 | did some fresh searches. I didn't actually even bother looking at my saved searches.
00:24:34.560 | I just went through fresh searches for the terms that I had found. And I made a list
00:24:39.760 | of the different vehicles that I had wanted to see. The key here is you, especially at
00:24:45.080 | least with my criteria, sometimes you got it. You got to see the vehicle to know what
00:24:49.880 | it's like, you know what it's actually available. And you want to see a few different options.
00:24:55.040 | If you're shopping for a new car, you go to the dealerships, you look at the car, shopping
00:24:59.680 | in a used car, you got to go see some of that model to see, OK, will this actually work?
00:25:05.000 | What does that how did the seats fold? Is there space for for us? Would we physically
00:25:09.120 | fit into the vehicle? What's it like? What's available in it? And so I just started sending
00:25:15.480 | messages in this case, doing everything in Portuguese. I don't speak Portuguese. And
00:25:20.520 | so I use the automated system of in Facebook. It has an automated system. Hey, is this car
00:25:26.640 | available? So I just send one of those messages and then I followed it up with can I come
00:25:31.000 | see this today or can I come see this tomorrow? Use Google Translate, translate it into Portuguese,
00:25:36.440 | copy paste, copy paste, copy paste. And so I just started sending dozens and dozens of
00:25:40.760 | messages to all the cars that I was interested in that were in my price range that were available.
00:25:46.480 | And I said, you know, when when is it available? And I had to indicate interest. And then the
00:25:52.840 | first people to get back to me, I immediately scheduled a time to go and see it, trying
00:25:57.760 | to do it for the soonest possible. I looked at my first car on Sunday night and it was
00:26:03.320 | a cheap car that the guys that I can show it to you as an inexpensive car. It was a
00:26:08.120 | Volkswagen Sharam and a seven seat minivan. It was in it was well used. It was in rough
00:26:15.880 | shape. But I went I looked at it, got a sense. OK, this one's twenty four ninety five. I
00:26:20.160 | think it was. Here's what's available. Here's how many kilometers you drive it. Yeah. AC
00:26:24.480 | doesn't work. It's pretty dirty, pretty clunky. This is not quite going to work for me. And
00:26:29.800 | then the next day I looked at cars all day long, looked at, I don't know, seven or eight
00:26:34.120 | cars. I had rented I rented a car so that I would make sure that I had something to
00:26:37.120 | easily go back and forth across town. But the idea is look at as many cars as possible.
00:26:42.520 | And in my case, because of the price range, very few, a few of the cars would have worked
00:26:48.100 | for me. But a lot of them didn't because they didn't have working AC. And so I quickly learned
00:26:53.960 | what I need to do is let my fingers do the walking. Once I've seen one Volkswagen Sharam,
00:26:59.080 | I've seen enough. OK, here's a Renault Espace. Now I understand what that offers and what
00:27:03.480 | it doesn't. Here's a Citroen C4. Here's what that offers. Here's a Kia Carnival. OK, that's
00:27:09.960 | what that looks like. Now I get a sense of what's available and and move on. Then it
00:27:15.240 | was a matter of me kind of homing in on. All right. Do I want a smaller minivan? Do I want
00:27:21.440 | a smaller big car, something like a Citroen C4, which is not a minivan? It's just a big
00:27:27.520 | seven seat car. How would that fit us? Do I want something like a minivan or I want
00:27:32.600 | to go ahead and go up to a bigger van? And so by the midday on my first day Monday, I
00:27:37.960 | decided what I need to do is I need to see a couple of more vans because most of the
00:27:41.000 | full size vans were more money than I wanted to spend. But I found a few ads in the six
00:27:46.040 | thousand euros, eight thousand euros, five thousand euros. And so the idea was I want
00:27:51.440 | to go and get a sense of what five thousand euros or six thousand euros would buy me in
00:27:55.800 | a full size van. So I emailed or Facebook messaged a couple of those and went to go
00:28:02.240 | and see some of those. And so quickly I had figured out a couple of models that I thought
00:28:08.040 | would work, a couple of models that I thought wouldn't work. I'd seen a couple of different
00:28:12.060 | versions of it and I'd seen some bigger vans. The idea here is you need to train your brain
00:28:16.640 | to recognize quality when you find it and lack of quality when you find it. So an example,
00:28:22.600 | I went and looked at a Renault Espace. It was my first car that I looked at on Monday
00:28:26.640 | morning, looked at it, drove it, considered it, said a little small, wouldn't quite be
00:28:33.240 | super comfortable with the luggage that we needed, but it would work. And so I drove
00:28:38.520 | one that was at a dealership. It's great. It was OK. But then later that morning, I
00:28:43.240 | went and looked at another one being sold by a private party. And you could just feel
00:28:47.560 | because you would just come from the previous one. You could see and feel that this second
00:28:52.160 | one was much better cared for. It was a much better shape. Everything was better about
00:28:56.840 | it, even though both were physically clean. By immediately having gone to see another
00:29:00.960 | one, you recognize this is a this is the better deal. And so it's worth it to look at a couple
00:29:05.340 | of models of a couple of versions of the model that you're interested in. In my case, I narrowed
00:29:11.960 | in by the end of Monday. I narrowed in onto the idea that I knew the model that I wanted.
00:29:17.940 | I decided that I didn't want to go with a big car. I didn't want to go with the Citroen
00:29:23.440 | C4 or the Renault Espace. I didn't want to go with the big van. I just didn't I don't
00:29:29.520 | have I don't need it. I looked at a couple of cool options. I looked at a four wheel
00:29:32.680 | drive Mitsubishi van. That was cool. It was really neat. Old diesel four wheel drive van.
00:29:38.840 | I loved it, but no AC. And I decided, you know what, I'm not doing an off road expedition,
00:29:44.640 | you know, from the from London to Cape Town at the moment. I don't need four wheel drive.
00:29:50.660 | I do need AC. And this one doesn't have it. And that seemed to be the standout one. Of
00:29:56.160 | course, in a mild climate here like Portugal, the AC is not as important as it is in some
00:30:01.920 | hotter places. But I don't want to be stuck not having air conditioning. So I quickly
00:30:05.580 | learned that that was a thing that that so many cars I was interested in didn't work.
00:30:10.800 | And then so by the end of Monday, I'd pretty much narrowed narrowed in on the fact that
00:30:14.080 | I didn't want a big van. I didn't want a smaller car wanted a minivan. And of the minivan options
00:30:20.160 | that are available, there was the Ford Galaxy, there's the Volkswagen Chiron. But a lot of
00:30:25.280 | them that but what I've honed in on is the Kia Carnival is like I like this Kia Carnival.
00:30:30.260 | It's an older van. It's not really sale for sale in Europe right now, which is a potentially
00:30:35.320 | a problem with parts. But of course it is the Carnival brand is the Kia Sedona is the
00:30:41.000 | same car market under different branding. And Kia Sedona is quite useful. I like the
00:30:45.880 | new minivans I rented when I was in Mexico. I rented a Kia brand new Kia Sedona really
00:30:50.620 | enjoyed it. It was great. So I'd like to buy one of these older Kia Sedona. It's a small
00:30:56.280 | car. It's a small, small van has enough space, it would probably work the price ranges right,
00:31:01.200 | etc. And so then I had a focus for the end of the day on Monday. I had I looked through
00:31:07.040 | all the ads, I had one car that I thought was probably the best it was the most expensive
00:31:11.280 | car listed on Facebook on that of that of that type. It did think at 40 kilometers around
00:31:17.800 | Lisbon, and it was the most expensive one, but it clearly looked like the nicest the
00:31:22.100 | pictures were well done. Everything I looked and I thought this is going to be the nicest.
00:31:27.400 | But the guy wasn't available to show it to me. Until Tuesday night, I tried by Monday,
00:31:33.560 | I tried to get him to do it on Monday night, couldn't do it. I tried to get him to show
00:31:36.520 | it to me on Tuesday morning, couldn't do it. And I was pretty well convinced in my mind,
00:31:40.160 | by the end of Monday of one day of looking that this this car that I see this ad is probably
00:31:46.560 | going to be the one that I wind up buying because it just looks nicer. And I'm not one
00:31:51.520 | for appearances. To me too much. I take my children to the beach and we get in the car
00:31:57.640 | and we're sandy and we're wet. I don't worry too much about it. But I do think that there's
00:32:02.760 | a lot of truth in the aphorism that how you do anything is how you do everything. And
00:32:06.880 | a car that's well cared for physically in terms of appearance has a higher probability
00:32:12.520 | of being well cared for mechanically than I think a car that has been beaten up physically.
00:32:17.800 | And so I decided that that was probably going to be the one but it wasn't available until
00:32:22.160 | Tuesday night. So I spent good part of the day Tuesday working but I did look at a couple
00:32:27.160 | more. The final last car I thought very seriously about going and buy going ahead and buying
00:32:32.600 | a Toyota Hiace, which I found a phenomenal deal on one that was well a couple and so
00:32:42.680 | Tuesday morning I looked at two of those back to back one with 300,000 kilometers another
00:32:47.760 | would have been owned by a sports team or actually a pair that were being sold for 75,000
00:32:51.600 | kilometers. Problem was it was going to be 13,000 euros to buy it and I just thought
00:32:55.720 | I can't unload a 13,000 euro car in a day or two if I want to like that 13,000 euro
00:33:02.200 | car is going to take a couple weeks to unload probably unless I dump the price really really
00:33:08.440 | big and so I just can't unload it. So I decided to stick to the plan of the original price
00:33:13.880 | range that I set. But by then I knew okay I've looked at enough. So then on Tuesday
00:33:19.120 | afternoon I arranged very quickly two more Kia Carnival to look at because I had honed
00:33:26.280 | in on that model being the best fit for me and I looked at them all back to back and
00:33:30.520 | so by the time Tuesday night at five o'clock I arrived at the final viewing that I had
00:33:35.120 | arranged of the one that I thought was nicer. I had literally just come from from a different
00:33:40.840 | one that I just driven and I could see how I could sense how it how it was and I arrived
00:33:47.840 | to find that yes indeed this Kia Carnival is as nice as I thought and it was a lot more
00:33:53.440 | expensive than the other one. You know the one that I had just driven previously was
00:33:58.480 | 2400 euros and the one that I was test driving started off at 4250. So it was more expensive
00:34:08.000 | but let me pause for a quick monologue on price of used vehicles and how to how to think
00:34:15.320 | about it. With a used vehicle your single biggest risk is that the vehicle that there's
00:34:27.440 | something wrong with it. With a new vehicle there's generally nothing wrong with a brand
00:34:32.600 | new vehicle. In theory it's possible to get a lemon. Yes that does happen but it infrequently
00:34:38.680 | happens you can check reliability data etc. across a brand and model pretty easily. In
00:34:47.200 | theory you can get a lemon but it's unlikely and so when you buy a new vehicle you know
00:34:51.960 | what you're getting. When you buy a used vehicle you have no idea what you're getting. I don't
00:34:56.960 | think this is as big of a deal as a lot of people say it is. I believe personally that
00:35:03.280 | car quality has increased so much over the last few decades that you could probably buy
00:35:10.220 | most cars sight unseen and be pretty well okay. I think this is true across most brands.
00:35:17.520 | I think this is true across most cars. People talk about oh you shouldn't buy a rental.
00:35:22.000 | Well I don't think that that's really the case. Cars are built to be driven and certainly
00:35:28.880 | there are people who drive the car without oil in it. There are there are problems I'm
00:35:32.220 | not negating that but most of the time if the car has lower mileage it's going to be
00:35:36.720 | fine everything's going to work fine with it. How you avoid the single biggest risk
00:35:42.020 | of a used car is by making sure you buy a car where you know its history. So you can
00:35:46.800 | check its Carfax report. The best way to do it is to buy a car from somebody that you
00:35:51.760 | know. Somebody who's had the car for at least a couple years. It doesn't have to be a single
00:35:54.840 | owner car but you want somebody to have had the car that you know is going to tell you
00:35:57.880 | the truth about it for the last couple of years. So I have a standing policy that any
00:36:01.600 | time I know somebody who is who is selling a car that they've owned personally I go and
00:36:09.320 | look at it and I think is this a vehicle that would fit in a useful intelligent way into
00:36:14.240 | our family's fleet because I can eliminate the single biggest risk of a used car by simply
00:36:19.440 | knowing the history. You know I have a friend of mine who has a minivan. He bought it brand
00:36:23.280 | new it's a Toyota Sienna minivan. I told him I said listen he likes to drive newer cars.
00:36:27.840 | I said listen if you ever want to sell this call me I'll buy the van from you. I'll give
00:36:32.240 | you more than the dealer would pay for you and I'll buy immediately because I know at
00:36:35.720 | some point in time I'm going to need a minivan like that. This is a nice one. He bought it
00:36:40.000 | new he's had it for a few years and so he's got a standing offer. The day he wants to
00:36:43.760 | sell is the day Joshua buys it. I'm not him. I don't need to look at it. I trust him. I
00:36:49.000 | know him. Just tell me what the dealer is going to give you for it and I'll increase
00:36:54.360 | that I'll give you more than that. It's done. That's all I need to do. So because that eliminates
00:37:00.400 | my risk and I know it fits what I need to get a good deal on a vehicle that I will find
00:37:05.440 | useful. In looking at other people's cars though what you're looking for is you're looking
00:37:12.720 | for condition and you're looking for a story that makes sense. You're looking for someone
00:37:18.040 | to show you a story where everything clicks. The car the story that the physical vehicle
00:37:23.940 | is telling is that lines up with the story that the person is telling. And so when I
00:37:29.320 | saw this ad and I started communicating on on messenger everything was lining up. Everything
00:37:36.240 | was making sense with a really good quality car. And then when I came from the previous
00:37:43.720 | vehicle and saw this one you get in you drive it. The clutch and the brake and the accelerator
00:37:50.360 | pedal everything is there. The steering is pretty tight. The gearbox shifts smoothly
00:37:55.520 | like just those little things not to be a mechanic just those little things make sense.
00:37:59.400 | And so a quick inspection of the car look at the seals etc. Talk about that in a moment.
00:38:05.000 | And I knew hey this is the vehicle that I would like to to have. Now here's what I look
00:38:11.200 | for when I am buying a car. First of all I'm not a car mechanic. I don't enjoy it. I'm
00:38:19.540 | not into it. But I can carry a flashlight and I can look under the hood. So even being
00:38:26.040 | relatively uneducated the first thing I do is just simply pop the hood with engine cold
00:38:32.080 | if possible. Pop the hood and look at everything. Especially look at belts and hoses. Look at
00:38:37.960 | a belt see is the belt in good condition. Hoses are there is the rubber good etc. Look
00:38:43.300 | for oil. I use a flashlight look down on the bottom of the engine look all around on the
00:38:47.440 | suspension parts is there excessive amounts of oil. Then get down and look under the car
00:38:51.680 | look at the CV boots. The boots on the CV axles and see is there are these is the rubber
00:38:57.040 | good is it is it clean are these new or are these falling apart is there is there excessive
00:39:01.800 | oil under the car somehow. Take a look just at the physical appearance of things. Smell
00:39:08.640 | for anything weird and then start turn the car on and listen. Look for smoke look for
00:39:14.080 | noises that you consider and hear and then take it on a drive and see what it feels.
00:39:19.480 | And that's about as far as you need to go at least with your ability. Now you can have
00:39:23.260 | a mechanic inspect it and that's always a recommendation. But over time you can I think
00:39:28.900 | learn to do your own inspections as well. I've had enough mechanics inspect things that
00:39:33.780 | you kind of get a sense of what they're doing. I remember this when I bought my first RV
00:39:36.600 | I took the mechanic and I just watched him do his inspection and then I got to the point
00:39:40.920 | where okay I could repeat that and I can understand what the mechanic did and then I can repeat
00:39:47.040 | how he did his inspection. I'm not going to be as good as he is but if I I build a little
00:39:51.840 | bit more skill. So if it's your first time take the car to a mechanic arrange that with
00:39:57.280 | a seller that I'd like to have my mechanic inspect it have it inspected and just ask
00:40:00.760 | him what are you looking for when you do the actual inspection and then learn from the
00:40:06.600 | process. And so I the other thing that I'm looking for is as I said the story. So think
00:40:13.280 | about all the communication and get a sense of what's the story. I looked at one Kia Carnival
00:40:18.600 | that I thought was okay but the story wasn't making sense to me. The vehicle was cheap
00:40:25.600 | in fact it was one of the cheapest ones that I found. It was okay mechanically I didn't
00:40:29.280 | find any glaring errors with it but the story didn't make sense. The guy said he bought
00:40:33.840 | it for his wife asked him how long have you had it. Now maybe this was a lost in translation
00:40:37.720 | problem because he's speaking in Portuguese and I'm speaking in Spanish and you know there's
00:40:42.240 | some crossover lap but the end of the day you know I could have misunderstood him but
00:40:46.640 | he told me that he bought the car for his wife a month or two ago but it was too big
00:40:52.060 | for her and so I said well what did you get in exchange. Well I got her a little itty
00:40:55.760 | bitty car so why are you selling it. Well I need the money. Like nothing made sense
00:40:59.860 | it wasn't a story that made sense. Normal people don't go and buy their wives a minivan
00:41:05.080 | with seven seats and then she decides oh it is indeed too big and then turn around and
00:41:09.520 | buy her a tiny car a month later. That doesn't make sense. Maybe you go from a full-size
00:41:15.920 | car to a medium-size car maybe you go from a minivan to a large SUV but you don't go
00:41:20.280 | from a minivan to a tiny little car without some more explanation. So there were other
00:41:24.800 | things as well but you just get a sense this doesn't feel right and I walked away. When
00:41:29.920 | I got to the vehicle that I ended up buying everything made sense. Just ticked all the
00:41:35.160 | boxes etc. So the way I do it is ask your questions multiple times multiple ways. So
00:41:41.760 | if you study interrogation techniques how does an interrogator get somebody to tell
00:41:48.720 | them that they're lying. Well you usually get it by getting the person to tell you what
00:41:53.240 | happened and then you talk a little bit and then you get the person to tell you what happened.
00:41:58.640 | And it's very difficult if somebody is making up a story for all the little details to match
00:42:03.600 | between those things. And so if you're a sharp listener you can always hear the discrepancies
00:42:10.160 | and then understand what's happening and you can get a sense as the whole story fit. In
00:42:14.720 | this case as soon as I got in the car I knew this is a good car and the story fit and now
00:42:19.840 | it's just a matter of arranging the details. In terms of pricing what I have found to be
00:42:26.920 | effective in terms of pricing is to recognize I don't always want to have the cheapest car.
00:42:34.440 | With a used vehicle that's what I tried to say earlier and I got a little sidetracked
00:42:37.720 | forgive me. With a used vehicle saving $500 on the front end is not nearly as important
00:42:45.240 | as getting a good car because you'll spend $500 on a single mechanical visit to the mechanic.
00:42:52.040 | One of the biggest vehicle mistakes I made was a few years ago I bought a van. I bought
00:42:56.600 | a cheap van. I was tickled pink with my deal. I thought I'd gotten the deal of the century
00:43:01.680 | and I inspected it. Everything looked great. Everything seemed to make sense but then the
00:43:05.640 | van wasn't working. And I wound up spending I think I bought the van for like $2,500.
00:43:10.720 | I wound up spending $3,500 on the mechanic just trying to get the thing going. It never
00:43:14.260 | could get going. Sold it. Took a loss on it and went on with my life. The point is that
00:43:22.420 | mechanic bills can add up quickly. That was why I said with my friend who's got the minivan
00:43:27.800 | why would I'll happily pay you $1,000 more than the dealer will pay you and pay you today
00:43:32.560 | any day you decide you want to sell the car because that $1,000 for a vehicle that I know
00:43:37.280 | is taken care of will be far cheaper than just a couple of new parts bolted out in time.
00:43:44.000 | I've learned to not take the lower end of the market if it can be avoided. I didn't
00:43:48.040 | mind looking at the most expensive minivan that was listed there because the van had
00:43:52.560 | enough of the features, the extras that made it justified. It was in good condition and
00:43:57.920 | somebody who prices their vehicle like that who's not a dealer knows that this is a quality
00:44:03.040 | vehicle. Whenever I've gone to sell a vehicle private party I always price it where I think
00:44:07.880 | the market deserves to be. And if I'm confident that my vehicle's a good vehicle I'm going
00:44:13.440 | to put a decent price on it. So I don't mind buying a more expensive vehicle. The overall
00:44:21.360 | price is going to be beat down by the market itself. I didn't check Blue Book. I don't
00:44:27.000 | know if Blue Book, I assume Europe probably has one. I didn't do the research to find
00:44:31.280 | out. I knew because I looked at several competitors. I knew what these things are going for. I
00:44:35.200 | knew this one's a little bit more but I looked at it and I said everything about this makes
00:44:38.800 | sense. This car has the marks of a well taken care of car. The whole story, I'll skip the
00:44:43.040 | whole back story, but the whole story clicks. Everything makes sense about this. So I then
00:44:48.840 | asked them, now price negotiation. What can you do in price negotiation? Best thing you
00:44:52.720 | can do is just ask when someone's selling you something, ask them if they can lower
00:44:56.840 | the price. You don't need to do any kind of games or anything silly. Just ask them to
00:45:01.600 | lower the price. And so if someone's asking, in my case $42.50 for a car, then just say
00:45:08.040 | can you do anything lower than that? Can you do anything better than that? If someone says
00:45:13.520 | in a real negotiation, you don't be the first one to say the number, just ask, can you do
00:45:17.320 | any better than that? Not going to hurt you if they can't, you're not offending anyone.
00:45:20.820 | But most people will come off a price a little bit quickly if you just say, hey, can you
00:45:23.760 | do any better than that? And then in this case, I decided that my negotiation, I wanted
00:45:30.320 | to negotiate on terms, not on price. So in a negotiation, there are usually multiple
00:45:35.900 | things that you can negotiate. Put simply, we can call it price or we can call it terms.
00:45:42.160 | In the car marketplace, you see dealers do this all the time. They come to you and say,
00:45:46.800 | well, you know, this car is $19,995 or it's $199 a month. Well, you can negotiate those
00:45:56.040 | terms. And for one guy, the $19,995 is a better deal than $199 a month. For another guy, the
00:46:03.760 | $19,999 a month is a vastly better deal because he's got that. He doesn't have the $19,995.
00:46:08.560 | And so then when you get into the details, you can negotiate on length of term, length
00:46:13.020 | of payments or interest rate. And you can go through and negotiate all the terms. And
00:46:17.800 | so I pretty quickly agreed to the seller's price because in my experience, people who
00:46:24.240 | have a high quality product sometimes don't like too much to be beaten up on price. And
00:46:34.840 | so my interest with this car was not to get the cheapest deal, saving $200 when I've got
00:46:42.880 | a rental car sitting there, you know, $70 a day. That's not the most important thing.
00:46:47.520 | The most important thing is not saving, getting, saying, OK, I saved $200. It's actually to
00:46:52.040 | get somebody who will help me close the deal quickly. And so I negotiated on terms and
00:46:56.480 | I said, you know, here's the deal. I'm an American tourist buying the car and I want
00:47:00.720 | to pay with this method of payment. I want to do the deal in this terms. And here's my
00:47:08.080 | I need you to work with me to help me get the registration done, help me with language,
00:47:12.280 | etc. And so we were able to negotiate on terms. And then the other thing is once you've agreed
00:47:19.840 | to price, if you're going to renegotiate price or negotiate price, let the car negotiate
00:47:24.400 | the price. Go and do your inspection. And if you find some problems, you come back and
00:47:29.200 | say, listen, I was going to pay you $4000 for the car, but the inspection found this,
00:47:34.720 | this, this, this, this. I can't do that. You know, the estimate here is this is going to
00:47:39.840 | cost me X number of dollars. If I pay this price to you, it's just it's just not fair.
00:47:44.840 | I can't do it. And so that's a much more worthwhile technique, negotiation technique than than
00:47:53.560 | the alternate than trying just to beat someone up on the front end of a price. The final
00:47:57.600 | bit of language that I'll share with you is language that's been useful to me. I believe
00:48:01.360 | that honesty in all dealings is the best policy. And so language that I have used successfully
00:48:09.280 | is with a buyer is just simply to say what I told you. I was like, hey, listen, this
00:48:14.640 | is a really nice car. You know, I like the car a lot. I'd like to buy it. This is a really
00:48:19.120 | good car. And I don't think your price is unfair. I think that if you wait a little
00:48:25.760 | bit longer, you'll probably find someone who could come along and pay this price that you're
00:48:29.640 | asking for the car. But I can't personally pay the price. But what I can pay is this.
00:48:35.520 | And I got the money right here. If you'd like to sell it today, I'd be happy to to buy it
00:48:40.840 | today. And I found that's just a simple, honest, truthful scenario. If you find a nice car
00:48:47.400 | and you say this car probably is worth this, you're not wrong. You haven't insulted anybody.
00:48:51.480 | You're being honest, but you're also being honest. I'm not going to pay that price. I'm
00:48:56.080 | happy to pay this price and I'm happy to close today. I'm happy to hand you the money right
00:48:59.800 | now. And so that's useful, a little bit of language that I have found to be helpful to
00:49:05.120 | me.
00:49:06.120 | At the end of the day, then it's just a matter of arranging the details. When and where am
00:49:11.560 | I going to drive it home? How are we going to arrange the title transfer? In my case,
00:49:15.840 | with it being Portugal, I needed the seller's help to do all of that. We needed to figure
00:49:20.720 | out money conversion, currency conversions. We needed to figure out the actual registration
00:49:26.520 | process. I needed some handholding in that. And so that was another reason why I wasn't
00:49:31.440 | in this transaction, wasn't too worried about price, not being an expert, not being a local,
00:49:36.080 | figuring things out. I needed someone who would be willing to do a few extra things
00:49:40.760 | for me. And I just picture the price as being a little bit of a consulting fee. Don't get
00:49:46.600 | me wrong. I got some negotiations on the price. I got the price pulled off a decent amount.
00:49:53.520 | I was happy with to account for a couple of things. But what was more important was I
00:49:58.480 | got a smooth transaction and I made a friend out of the deal. And I think it's the point
00:50:03.280 | of a win-win deal is that my goal in any transaction anywhere is to make it a win-win deal. I want
00:50:10.440 | people to feel like they win from doing business with me and that I win from doing business
00:50:14.360 | with them. And I want us to part as friends. So that is how I accomplished the purchase
00:50:21.920 | of a car. I'll let you know if it turns out to be right or wrong. I did miss one thing
00:50:26.880 | on the vehicle that being fixed quite literally as we speak or as I record anyway. And that
00:50:35.040 | was my mistake. I missed one small thing, but it's no big deal. I expected to do that.
00:50:39.880 | And that's the other thing is that when you buy a used car, at least for me, when I buy
00:50:43.800 | a used car, I'm going to expect to change some things. I knew I had to put new tires
00:50:46.980 | on it. No big deal. I put new tires on it. A lot of times it's just maintenance items
00:50:51.680 | that have piled up. So new tires, new wipers, new battery, all that stuff that adds up.
00:50:55.760 | So just make sure you keep your budget available. And as I've stated in the standalone show,
00:51:01.680 | always budget for the accessories. If you've got $500 to do something, then spend $300
00:51:06.880 | on the primary thing and then spend $200 on the accessories that you need in order to
00:51:11.040 | do the thing that you want to do. Don't max your budget out on the thing itself. Plan
00:51:16.280 | for the accessories and the service and all that stuff that makes the thing useful. But
00:51:21.200 | that's how I did it. I think the biggest tool is just use Facebook Marketplace and let the
00:51:26.640 | algorithm help you. And I think you'll find good success.
00:51:31.640 | Cars. I've changed the way that I talk about cars. I used to be on the standard personal
00:51:39.560 | finance bandwagon of cars are so expensive and moderate the amount of money that you
00:51:44.000 | spend on. That's true. That's true. I've over the years, I've counseled a lot of people
00:51:51.720 | and their cars are just destroying their net worth. It's true. However, as I have increasingly
00:52:02.320 | worked with, studied and learned from wealthier people, maybe it's just me that's changing.
00:52:08.880 | But for a wealthy person, meaning a high income earner or a wealthy person, your car is not
00:52:15.520 | going to make a meaningful difference in your overall financial plan. So just make sure
00:52:22.120 | that you buy the kind of car that's not going to make a meaningful difference in your overall
00:52:25.880 | financial plan. And so I'm less on the car bandwagon than I once was. Hopefully I can
00:52:39.360 | that I'm expressing that clearly. If you're earning twenty thousand dollars a year working
00:52:43.600 | as an entry level waiter in a restaurant, don't go out and buy a new car. Nothing meaningful
00:52:51.560 | is going to come from your career because of the fact that you went out and bought a
00:52:56.040 | new car, build your career first and figure out how to go from twenty to two hundred thousand
00:52:59.600 | dollars a year and invest into yourself. Go car free when you're twenty grand. But if
00:53:06.280 | you're on the trajectory where your your income is growing, then just be thoughtful. Don't
00:53:11.640 | waste money. But the car doesn't have to be something that you stress about. It doesn't
00:53:16.080 | have to be a major factor in your overall financial situation. I think that if you're
00:53:22.040 | worried about the cost of gas, if you're worried about the cost of a car, I don't mean this
00:53:26.340 | to sound arrogant, but I think you're doing it wrong. Change the choices that you make
00:53:33.160 | so that you can do business in a in a sense where you don't worry about the cost of the
00:53:38.320 | car and you don't worry about the cost of the gas. The reason I wanted a budget three
00:53:43.280 | to five thousand dollars for a vehicle to drive around Europe was because I viewed that
00:53:49.520 | as throwaway money. Not that I want to throw away three to five thousand dollars, but I'm
00:53:53.120 | comparing it to the alternative, comparing it to Ubers, I'm comparing it to renting a
00:53:58.600 | car, etc. And so I'm just saying this is the amount of money that I'm comfortable spending
00:54:03.480 | as throwaway money. So if it all disappears, I'm OK. And when you do that over time and
00:54:11.000 | you make choices where you don't stretch your capacity, then you can focus and go back to
00:54:18.280 | other things. The biggest cost for me, the car has not been the money. The biggest cost
00:54:21.880 | of the car has been simply the time invested in getting it done. I've lost basically a
00:54:28.800 | week in getting all the details done. I've gotten some work done, but still I'm sitting
00:54:33.200 | here on Friday afternoon waiting for the tires to be finished on it. And so that's an expensive
00:54:40.060 | cost to lose a week of productivity because you're going looking at cars. That's much
00:54:44.540 | more expensive to me than the money. And more and more, I'm realizing that one of my biggest
00:54:50.560 | financial mistakes has been and still is choosing time, costly frugality as compared to simply
00:55:01.520 | spending money in order to reclaim time. And so I've been trying to analyze how I'm using
00:55:08.080 | my time and realize that frugality that requires time is often not been the best solution.
00:55:17.200 | Even in this whole thing, I wondered maybe I should have just gone with a brand new Renault
00:55:22.440 | with a three month lease or whatever. In my case, it didn't seem like the right thing
00:55:28.400 | to do. But probably next time I'll do things that maximize time more and more. Because
00:55:35.880 | when you realize how precious time is, then it seems really foolish to squander it. And
00:55:43.040 | I've squandered too much of it in my life. On that note, thank you for listening. I wish
00:55:48.560 | you good Friday and I will be back with you very soon.
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