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It's more than just a ticket. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Josh Rasheeds.

I'm your host. Today, I'm going to talk to you about how to get a hopefully high-quality used car fast and cheap. I'm going to share with you something I have learned. I'm not a professional, but I have bought and sold quite a few cars now. I haven't totaled up the number, but it's certainly at least 12, 15, probably closer to 20, I don't know, just for my own personal use.

I've had some winners, had some losers, but along the way, I've gained some experience. I want to share that with you because you might use this knowledge in a variety of different circumstances. You might need it now to get a deal on a good quality used car for yourself and for your family.

You might use it in the future when you need to just buy a car all of a sudden, or you might do what I'm doing, which was show up in Portugal and try to buy a low-priced but high-quality used car fast. I'm going to tell you how I have done it.

I don't yet know if the car that I bought is high-quality. I believe that it is, but if it turns out not to be, I'll let you know. It's always a risk, but I'll tell you how I did it fast and how I go about the process of doing it.

In the next show in this series, I'll tell you why I came to Portugal. Put quite simply, I wanted to buy a car in Europe, and Portugal was the first country that I figured out would allow me to buy a car, register it, and insure it on the European continent.

I figured, "Hey, once I get the car, I can drive wherever I want, anywhere from literally Europe, Asia, and Africa," but I didn't want to deal with trying to ship a car from the United States or some other place to another country or another continent. That's tricky. I've done it, but it's tricky.

Let's talk about the process. To begin with, one of the things that you want to make sure that you understand is what your minimum requirements are for a vehicle. Your minimum requirements can be whatever you decide that they are, but you want to get a sense of, "What do I absolutely want and need in a vehicle?" These things will change over time.

Your minimum requirements might be, "That vehicle needs to be able to take me from point A to point B." Fine. If you need to take one person from point A to point B, that's something that can be done very quickly. In my case, my minimum requirements have more to do with seating and cargo capacity.

I need six belted seats, at least, and I need, at the moment, some cargo capacity. It doesn't need to be huge, but I need some cargo capacity. Then I specified a basic level of comfort. I was looking for something that would have a basic level of comfort. I need air conditioning, functional air conditioning throughout the whole car.

The biggest thing there is we do a lot of, when you're traveling, like we're traveling, you wind up doing quite a few long days on the road. Long days on the road with the windows open, with a car full of people, are very, very tiring. I remember the first time I rode a motorcycle, I rode a Harley from West Palm Beach to Key West.

Then we were headed back from Key West to West Palm Beach. It's about, I don't know, four and a half, five hour road. I remember so vividly, it took us all day riding, a few stops here and there, but it was hot, it was sunny. I remember so vividly getting off the motorcycles, 10 o'clock at night, got to our destination in West Palm Beach, got off the motorcycle, and I looked at my riding partner, and I just said, "I am wiped out.

I was exhausted." You say, "Why are you exhausted from sitting on the motorcycle?" You're not working, but the sun, the wind, the heat, everything exhausts you. It just made me so grateful to live when we live versus years ago of being a Pony Express rider or a cowboy, somebody going across the plains in a stagecoach where it's hot and it's loud.

It's exhausting. That is exhausting. The same thing happens with car travel. While I enjoy rolling my windows down and taking a short trip, if you're actually on the road all day with your windows down because you don't have functional air conditioning, it's exhausting. One time, my wife and I, we had a few young children, and we were in Orlando.

While we were in Orlando, the air conditioning in our minivan stopped working. We just had to do a fairly short and easy drive. It's about two hours from Orlando back to West Palm Beach where we were living at the time. We had either two or three babies in the car.

I can't remember. I was genuinely concerned about them potentially suffering heat stroke to the point where we stopped several times to stop and get cool drinks, go in the air conditioning in the service plazas. While we're going down the road, I'm literally pouring water on them so that there would be some evaporative cooling for them and also on myself where I'm getting my clothes wet and the children's clothes wet so they would be able to enjoy some evaporative cooling.

With little ones especially, heat is a major concern. One of my minimum requirements was air conditioning. Yours might be heat. You may need a functional heater. Think through what your minimum requirements are. You might have certain minimum requirements with regard to things like safety. I think this is a reasonable thing to consider.

You might say, "I don't want a vehicle that is poorly rated in crash safety ratings. I need to make sure that I have a certain thing there." You might have a requirement for a certain kind of fuel. I want a gasoline vehicle. I want a diesel vehicle. You might have a requirement for an automatic transmission or a requirement for a manual transmission.

You might have a requirement for a certain age of car. Some jobs will give you a stipend for a car, but each car has to be newer than a certain age. Or you might want a car that has a certain appeal, a certain sense of flash. I think while it used to be I would have said, "It doesn't matter what kind of car you drive." When I was younger and I was hyper frugal and just be like, "Drive whatever you want." I no longer believe that.

People are going to judge you based upon your car. It doesn't matter whether they should judge you or they shouldn't judge you. The fact that they are going to judge you means that you need to take it into consideration. You're free to be the kind of person who says, "They're going to judge me by my car and they're going to judge me wrong." But you have to understand that you're going to have certain results that come from what you choose to do and the image that you choose to portray in the world about the kind of car that you drive.

You might want to think through what those requirements are. Make, to the extent possible, a list of what requirements you have. Since I'm going to give advice in the context of what I've done recently, my personal requirements are very simple. I needed a car that was big enough, which means six seats minimum, six belted seats, comfortable enough, meaning air conditioning function and able to at least be comfortable, have enough space that the children are going to be okay.

I needed it to have enough space for baggage. It didn't need to be too big. We don't have a ton of baggage, but enough space to be baggage. The kind of car that I will be content to own for a few months to travel around Europe. That was basically the vision.

Then, to the degree possible, try to get a sense of what your price range would be before you ever start looking at cars. In my case, the price range that I decided I wanted to spend was somewhere between three to six thousand dollars. In Euros, somewhere three to five thousand Euros.

Somewhere in that range. Let me explain how I got there for me personally. I certainly could buy a more expensive car. In the course of my lifetime, I have purchased many high quality serviceable cars in the five thousand dollar range in the United States. I think you can get a high quality, very functional vehicle in that three, four, five thousand dollar range in the United States, where the used car market is quite flush with vehicles.

I would probably do that again, although at this point in time, I'm not as broke as I once was. The purchase of a car doesn't make much of a difference in my financial life. It makes a lot more sense for me just to have something that is a little bit nicer, a little bit newer, because it's nice to have those little technical things that you like, the technological things that I enjoy more and more, the active safety features.

You don't get those on the three to five thousand dollar cars at this point. You get those on twelve to twenty thousand dollar cars. I like the active safety features. Some of them, I think, are well worth having and I appreciate investing in the safety. But my thinking here in Europe was I want to have a throwaway car.

I didn't know if I'd be able to buy a car and I didn't know if I'd be able to buy a car and actually succeed in registering it. My research indicated to me that I could, but I wasn't sure about it. Number two, I don't know how long I'm going to use it might be for two months and then my visa runs out and I have to leave.

It might be for two years. And so my idea was I want a car that is a low enough amount of money that I basically mentally can walk away from it. I want to mentally have the ability to say even if this car's terminal value is zero, it breaks down on me.

I leave it on the side of the road. I call a taxi and take a taxi to the airport and fly out of the country and I don't even bother disposing of it properly. I'm okay doing that. That was my goal. Now, how did I arrive at the number then?

I looked at the rental costs and the comparable rental costs on a vehicle varied. If I rent a minivan or seven seat SUV from a mainstream rental program like Hertz or Avis or any of the other more European brands, that price range would basically run me somewhere in the range of about $800 a week.

That's kind of the number, the working number that I have in my head, $800 a week. So at $800 a week, four weeks a month, we're quickly in the range of $3,000 a month. Interestingly, when you start researching this subject, there are a number of European manufacturers that have some interesting leasing programs for people to buy cars and use them in Europe.

Because of the difficulty of buying and registering and insuring your own vehicle in Europe, some of the auto manufacturers have a policy. So for example, Renault or Citroen have policies where you can basically drive a brand new vehicle of theirs and it's basically a three-month lease. Although I don't remember the exact numbers at the moment, when I first researched those, I came out with a price range of a couple thousand dollars a month, which is cheaper than the weekly or week-to-week rentals, but it's still not throwaway money.

And so I thought, well, if I could spend something like, I'll use euros, three to 5,000 euros on a car, then in a worst case scenario, I walk away from the money completely. Let's say I'm into it for 5,000 euros. Well, if I kept the car for a few months, at least I'm a little bit ahead there financially.

It's unlikely, very unlikely that I would throw a car away that I spent 5,000 euros on. Very unlikely. What is more likely is I would decide to end my trip and I would need to sell the car in one week. And so how to, what kind of car would I have to have and what kind of price would I need to put on it in order for me to sell it quickly?

The fire sale price. And I think this is helpful when you purchase any kind of physical asset is you should have what you might consider the true market value. If I shine this thing up, list it, advertise it in all the right places and really get a good response, here's how much I could sell it for.

And then there's the fire sale price, the price that I put this on the market and it's gone by tomorrow morning because the first buyer comes along, sees the value in it, boom, goes on his way. So this is the, this is the, the, the way I calculate the numbers.

So I figure, all right, if I buy a car for 5,000 euros, maybe the fire sale price is 3,000 euros. I'm out to that two grand, uh, two grand. If that's amortized out over two months, now I'm at a thousand bucks a month. Okay. I can take that. Uh, maybe I'm out over four months.

I'm at now I'm at four, $500 a month makes even better. And so even if I did suffer that loss, then I'm good to go. And so I tried to consider what the price range would be and how much I would be willing to lose. That was how I picked it.

And so now we get to shopping. So the first thing to remember is that shopping is free and we are living in a golden age of shopping. You'll notice I use this phrase quite a lot because I am convinced it's true on almost any factor I look at. I used to be a sentimentalist for previous eras.

I no longer am. I'm glad to live in the year that I live in. There's no year I would rather live in than where, when we're living right now. Uh, and I genuinely believe that, uh, fully and completely. And so we live in a golden age of shopping and it's free to shop.

And what I believe is the most useful tool for a consumer to use when it comes to shopping for a car is Facebook marketplace. Facebook marketplace has the benefit of being globally ubiquitous. It's not the most popular website in every country. Every country has its own brand that is more popular.

It might be, um, you know, well, the Canadians Kijiji, right? Um, or Craigslist in some places for certain kinds of things. It might be, um, you know, every country has its own, its own local site and you can work in the local site if you want to. But, uh, and that's fine.

That's good. But what Facebook is nice for is Facebook gives you one global brand where there's increasing amounts of inventory of whatever you would want to buy that you can search and have an a centralized communication place that's pretty good and pretty safe. And so what I'll do on Facebook is I'll go to a certain place.

This is what I did in Europe. I was looking at campers. I thought about buying an RV in campers. So I go to Germany, uh, and I set a 500 kilometer radius around, um, you know, Munich. And then I figure out, okay, what is the, I try to figure out what's the word that is, what's the German word for camper.

And I searched for that, uh, or, or I, you know, I repeat this process. And so when I figured out, okay, I think I might be able to buy a car in Portugal. Then I quickly said, let me go to Portugal and on Facebook and figure out what kind of inventory is available and see is my goal of spending three or $4,000 on a car.

Can I get something for that? Or our car is more expensive or less expensive than that. And so I'd go to the, I would use Facebook marketplace, navigate to my target geography. I'd usually use Lisbon, put in a reason, you know, a hundred kilometers around Lisbon, something like that, and start looking for vehicles and start sorting for vehicles.

And the key here is you want to train your Facebook algorithm to deliver to you the kind of vehicles that you're looking for. And so in my case, I started by searching for a van and I found a model of van. Cause of course, some models of van, uh, would be makes and models that I'm familiar with.

And some are not, there's a whole different set of vehicles available in Europe versus North America versus every country. And so I figure out a model, I look at it and then I start searching for that model. Uh, so I don't know what the first one was, but it was probably something like a Renault Espace, right?

Renault Espace is a seven seat, um, MPV, a people carrier. And so it's the kind of thing that's big enough that would be good. Minivans as far as the minivan brands are not pop that I'm most accustomed to in North America, not popular here in Europe. I have yet to see a single Kia Sedona or a single Honda Odyssey or a single, uh, Toyota Sienna on the road.

These are not, these minivans not popular, but they do have a whole different set of people movers or MPVs that they use here. And so you try to figure out, okay, what's the brand that I'm targeting? And then you start saving, uh, certain listings. And then as you're saving and looking at those listings, look at what's recommended.

And so the Facebook algorithm will start serving up cars to you that are similar to what you start saving. And so it starts giving you more brands, right? I quickly learned just from Facebook that, oh, Volkswagen has a car called, I think it's a Sharam, uh, I'm blanking on it at the moment as I record this, but I think it was a Volkswagen Sharan.

It's a seven seat minivan basically. And oh, look, here's this other brand. There's also the Citroen, uh, C4 is another seven seat vehicle that could work. And, and little by little, your, your, your thing starts to be trained. Then I would also search by seat. So I know that the seating configurations, a lot of times are nine seats.

I figured out, uh, what, what are the, you look at the ads and you figure out what are the words that are written in the ads. So in Portuguese, um, then they would put, you know, seven seats, say to me, how to say it in Portuguese, say to Lugares.

And so they put seven seats and you say, okay, there's a seven seat. So you search for that and it gives you a whole listing of pages. So you click save, click, save, click, save, read the, read, read the descriptions, get a sense, look at the pictures, get a sense of what's available.

Or you search for nine seats and okay, here are all the nine seats, right? The Renault traffic or the, the Mercedes Vito. Uh, and I didn't know any of these vehicles before I started doing this, but I learned quickly learned the makes and the models that work and you figure out what's available in that place.

Now, ideally you want to do this when you have time. And so I started this process a couple of months ago, just browsing around different parts of Europe, looking at all the different things that are available on Facebook, shopping, getting a sense of what my money will buy. And so that can figure out if my budgets are accurate.

Can I afford this thing that I want to do? Uh, what could I get for my money? What are the sense of prices? And then when you go to Facebook marketplace every day, the algorithm will serve you up your recommended listings. And so basically after a few days of training it every day, you'll see new, new vehicles that you're interested in.

You click on those, get a sense of what's available and kind of move on. So that was how I did most of my shopping is with simply with Facebook marketplace. I did not contact anybody yet. I have found that to be kind of a really silly use of time, uh, until I'm ready to actually buy.

I didn't contact anybody. I just simply saved listings and I knew that there is an abundant inventory of the kind of vehicle that I'm looking for available in the price range that I am willing to spend. And that's your key is to get a sense of what's available. What's difficult.

You can get some information from ads. You can start to see, Oh look, this vehicle looks nicer. That vehicle doesn't look so nice. You can get a sense of here. This one's priced at this. If you're a really good shopper, you can look at previous auctions and say, Oh, this one sold at this price.

I don't, I didn't choose to allocate the time to that. I didn't see that. That's a useful thing to know. I don't need with a three to $5,000 decision. I don't need to spend hours and hours and hours on it. I just need to get a sense that something is available and I need to train the algorithm.

So then the final phase, what I did was you decide I'm ready to buy. And so ideally you need to have of course money in a transactions like this. You, in my opinion, always deal in cash, a little tricky in Europe, right? There's anti-cash laws in many parts of Europe where there's limits and the Europeans are pretty opposed to cash at this point.

It's very different than, than, I mean, every country has kind of its own culture around cash, but I still think that in most circumstances, cash is the best for this, this price range. If you were searching for a $15,000 car, I think the Europeans would be pretty nervous. A $30,000 car certainly that, you know, they'd want to deal in, in bank transfers and such, but at this price range, you can easily deal in cash.

And so you have your money ready and in used car buying cash is the way to go, especially in a North American audience. You want to make sure you deal in cash because cash will allow you many times to simply get a better deal. When somebody has had their car for sale for a few weeks and they got a guy that shows up, comes and looks at it and the auction was, or the listing was for $5,000 and he says, listen, you know, you could probably sell this for 5,000 to someone else, but I'd be happy to give you 4,000 for it.

And I got the cash right here. That speaks when somebody wants cash. Now there's lots of people who don't have any need to sell. And I said, no, thanks. I'll just hold out for my thousand dollars, but you can get 20% discount there, right there. And I think that in just about any city you could plop, I don't know, I feel like pretty confident that if you put a video camera on me, you could pop me down in any, any city and I could get a 20% discount on a car when you're dealing just in cash and in the used market like that, it just simply works.

And cash is so fungible that people love it. So back to my story of how I looked for it. The key here is using Facebook marketplace as a tool and training the algorithm. That's the benefit that what fell at fate. That's the benefit of what Facebook has that many of the other listing sites don't have.

Craigslist requires you to go to the site and search each day for the specific term that you want to search for. The benefit of that is it's not that difficult to eventually find the complete inventory of what's listed on Craigslist. And the same thing with, you know, in Quentra 24 or, you know, whatever local site you find, Kijiji or, you know, whatever it is that you find that's available to you, then you have to search them.

But what Facebook does and also offer up what these sites do is they train the algorithm. So you got to do is pop it open and there is a bunch of new fresh listings that the algorithm thinks will be of interest to you. And they're usually right. They're usually pretty good.

So I flew into Portugal on Sunday and that was when I started making calls. Because the other thing about Facebook communication is and in any of this kind of communication, you can't schedule things in advance. At this point in time, maybe there are still cultures, meaning whole countries of people who are good at keeping calendars.

But in my experience, there's in this kind of marketplace, you've got shifty people who can't keep an appointment to save their life. You're just going to have to wing it. And so I arrived in Portugal on Sunday around noon and then got my family all settled in, grabbed a phone at Sunday at three o'clock.

And that was when I started sending messages. And so what I did was I did some fresh searches. I didn't actually even bother looking at my saved searches. I just went through fresh searches for the terms that I had found. And I made a list of the different vehicles that I had wanted to see.

The key here is you, especially at least with my criteria, sometimes you got it. You got to see the vehicle to know what it's like, you know what it's actually available. And you want to see a few different options. If you're shopping for a new car, you go to the dealerships, you look at the car, shopping in a used car, you got to go see some of that model to see, OK, will this actually work?

What does that how did the seats fold? Is there space for for us? Would we physically fit into the vehicle? What's it like? What's available in it? And so I just started sending messages in this case, doing everything in Portuguese. I don't speak Portuguese. And so I use the automated system of in Facebook.

It has an automated system. Hey, is this car available? So I just send one of those messages and then I followed it up with can I come see this today or can I come see this tomorrow? Use Google Translate, translate it into Portuguese, copy paste, copy paste, copy paste.

And so I just started sending dozens and dozens of messages to all the cars that I was interested in that were in my price range that were available. And I said, you know, when when is it available? And I had to indicate interest. And then the first people to get back to me, I immediately scheduled a time to go and see it, trying to do it for the soonest possible.

I looked at my first car on Sunday night and it was a cheap car that the guys that I can show it to you as an inexpensive car. It was a Volkswagen Sharam and a seven seat minivan. It was in it was well used. It was in rough shape.

But I went I looked at it, got a sense. OK, this one's twenty four ninety five. I think it was. Here's what's available. Here's how many kilometers you drive it. Yeah. AC doesn't work. It's pretty dirty, pretty clunky. This is not quite going to work for me. And then the next day I looked at cars all day long, looked at, I don't know, seven or eight cars.

I had rented I rented a car so that I would make sure that I had something to easily go back and forth across town. But the idea is look at as many cars as possible. And in my case, because of the price range, very few, a few of the cars would have worked for me.

But a lot of them didn't because they didn't have working AC. And so I quickly learned what I need to do is let my fingers do the walking. Once I've seen one Volkswagen Sharam, I've seen enough. OK, here's a Renault Espace. Now I understand what that offers and what it doesn't.

Here's a Citroen C4. Here's what that offers. Here's a Kia Carnival. OK, that's what that looks like. Now I get a sense of what's available and and move on. Then it was a matter of me kind of homing in on. All right. Do I want a smaller minivan? Do I want a smaller big car, something like a Citroen C4, which is not a minivan?

It's just a big seven seat car. How would that fit us? Do I want something like a minivan or I want to go ahead and go up to a bigger van? And so by the midday on my first day Monday, I decided what I need to do is I need to see a couple of more vans because most of the full size vans were more money than I wanted to spend.

But I found a few ads in the six thousand euros, eight thousand euros, five thousand euros. And so the idea was I want to go and get a sense of what five thousand euros or six thousand euros would buy me in a full size van. So I emailed or Facebook messaged a couple of those and went to go and see some of those.

And so quickly I had figured out a couple of models that I thought would work, a couple of models that I thought wouldn't work. I'd seen a couple of different versions of it and I'd seen some bigger vans. The idea here is you need to train your brain to recognize quality when you find it and lack of quality when you find it.

So an example, I went and looked at a Renault Espace. It was my first car that I looked at on Monday morning, looked at it, drove it, considered it, said a little small, wouldn't quite be super comfortable with the luggage that we needed, but it would work. And so I drove one that was at a dealership.

It's great. It was OK. But then later that morning, I went and looked at another one being sold by a private party. And you could just feel because you would just come from the previous one. You could see and feel that this second one was much better cared for.

It was a much better shape. Everything was better about it, even though both were physically clean. By immediately having gone to see another one, you recognize this is a this is the better deal. And so it's worth it to look at a couple of models of a couple of versions of the model that you're interested in.

In my case, I narrowed in by the end of Monday. I narrowed in onto the idea that I knew the model that I wanted. I decided that I didn't want to go with a big car. I didn't want to go with the Citroen C4 or the Renault Espace. I didn't want to go with the big van.

I just didn't I don't have I don't need it. I looked at a couple of cool options. I looked at a four wheel drive Mitsubishi van. That was cool. It was really neat. Old diesel four wheel drive van. I loved it, but no AC. And I decided, you know what, I'm not doing an off road expedition, you know, from the from London to Cape Town at the moment.

I don't need four wheel drive. I do need AC. And this one doesn't have it. And that seemed to be the standout one. Of course, in a mild climate here like Portugal, the AC is not as important as it is in some hotter places. But I don't want to be stuck not having air conditioning.

So I quickly learned that that was a thing that that so many cars I was interested in didn't work. And then so by the end of Monday, I'd pretty much narrowed narrowed in on the fact that I didn't want a big van. I didn't want a smaller car wanted a minivan.

And of the minivan options that are available, there was the Ford Galaxy, there's the Volkswagen Chiron. But a lot of them that but what I've honed in on is the Kia Carnival is like I like this Kia Carnival. It's an older van. It's not really sale for sale in Europe right now, which is a potentially a problem with parts.

But of course it is the Carnival brand is the Kia Sedona is the same car market under different branding. And Kia Sedona is quite useful. I like the new minivans I rented when I was in Mexico. I rented a Kia brand new Kia Sedona really enjoyed it. It was great.

So I'd like to buy one of these older Kia Sedona. It's a small car. It's a small, small van has enough space, it would probably work the price ranges right, etc. And so then I had a focus for the end of the day on Monday. I had I looked through all the ads, I had one car that I thought was probably the best it was the most expensive car listed on Facebook on that of that of that type.

It did think at 40 kilometers around Lisbon, and it was the most expensive one, but it clearly looked like the nicest the pictures were well done. Everything I looked and I thought this is going to be the nicest. But the guy wasn't available to show it to me. Until Tuesday night, I tried by Monday, I tried to get him to do it on Monday night, couldn't do it.

I tried to get him to show it to me on Tuesday morning, couldn't do it. And I was pretty well convinced in my mind, by the end of Monday of one day of looking that this this car that I see this ad is probably going to be the one that I wind up buying because it just looks nicer.

And I'm not one for appearances. To me too much. I take my children to the beach and we get in the car and we're sandy and we're wet. I don't worry too much about it. But I do think that there's a lot of truth in the aphorism that how you do anything is how you do everything.

And a car that's well cared for physically in terms of appearance has a higher probability of being well cared for mechanically than I think a car that has been beaten up physically. And so I decided that that was probably going to be the one but it wasn't available until Tuesday night.

So I spent good part of the day Tuesday working but I did look at a couple more. The final last car I thought very seriously about going and buy going ahead and buying a Toyota Hiace, which I found a phenomenal deal on one that was well a couple and so Tuesday morning I looked at two of those back to back one with 300,000 kilometers another would have been owned by a sports team or actually a pair that were being sold for 75,000 kilometers.

Problem was it was going to be 13,000 euros to buy it and I just thought I can't unload a 13,000 euro car in a day or two if I want to like that 13,000 euro car is going to take a couple weeks to unload probably unless I dump the price really really big and so I just can't unload it.

So I decided to stick to the plan of the original price range that I set. But by then I knew okay I've looked at enough. So then on Tuesday afternoon I arranged very quickly two more Kia Carnival to look at because I had honed in on that model being the best fit for me and I looked at them all back to back and so by the time Tuesday night at five o'clock I arrived at the final viewing that I had arranged of the one that I thought was nicer.

I had literally just come from from a different one that I just driven and I could see how I could sense how it how it was and I arrived to find that yes indeed this Kia Carnival is as nice as I thought and it was a lot more expensive than the other one.

You know the one that I had just driven previously was 2400 euros and the one that I was test driving started off at 4250. So it was more expensive but let me pause for a quick monologue on price of used vehicles and how to how to think about it.

With a used vehicle your single biggest risk is that the vehicle that there's something wrong with it. With a new vehicle there's generally nothing wrong with a brand new vehicle. In theory it's possible to get a lemon. Yes that does happen but it infrequently happens you can check reliability data etc.

across a brand and model pretty easily. In theory you can get a lemon but it's unlikely and so when you buy a new vehicle you know what you're getting. When you buy a used vehicle you have no idea what you're getting. I don't think this is as big of a deal as a lot of people say it is.

I believe personally that car quality has increased so much over the last few decades that you could probably buy most cars sight unseen and be pretty well okay. I think this is true across most brands. I think this is true across most cars. People talk about oh you shouldn't buy a rental.

Well I don't think that that's really the case. Cars are built to be driven and certainly there are people who drive the car without oil in it. There are there are problems I'm not negating that but most of the time if the car has lower mileage it's going to be fine everything's going to work fine with it.

How you avoid the single biggest risk of a used car is by making sure you buy a car where you know its history. So you can check its Carfax report. The best way to do it is to buy a car from somebody that you know. Somebody who's had the car for at least a couple years.

It doesn't have to be a single owner car but you want somebody to have had the car that you know is going to tell you the truth about it for the last couple of years. So I have a standing policy that any time I know somebody who is who is selling a car that they've owned personally I go and look at it and I think is this a vehicle that would fit in a useful intelligent way into our family's fleet because I can eliminate the single biggest risk of a used car by simply knowing the history.

You know I have a friend of mine who has a minivan. He bought it brand new it's a Toyota Sienna minivan. I told him I said listen he likes to drive newer cars. I said listen if you ever want to sell this call me I'll buy the van from you.

I'll give you more than the dealer would pay for you and I'll buy immediately because I know at some point in time I'm going to need a minivan like that. This is a nice one. He bought it new he's had it for a few years and so he's got a standing offer.

The day he wants to sell is the day Joshua buys it. I'm not him. I don't need to look at it. I trust him. I know him. Just tell me what the dealer is going to give you for it and I'll increase that I'll give you more than that.

It's done. That's all I need to do. So because that eliminates my risk and I know it fits what I need to get a good deal on a vehicle that I will find useful. In looking at other people's cars though what you're looking for is you're looking for condition and you're looking for a story that makes sense.

You're looking for someone to show you a story where everything clicks. The car the story that the physical vehicle is telling is that lines up with the story that the person is telling. And so when I saw this ad and I started communicating on on messenger everything was lining up.

Everything was making sense with a really good quality car. And then when I came from the previous vehicle and saw this one you get in you drive it. The clutch and the brake and the accelerator pedal everything is there. The steering is pretty tight. The gearbox shifts smoothly like just those little things not to be a mechanic just those little things make sense.

And so a quick inspection of the car look at the seals etc. Talk about that in a moment. And I knew hey this is the vehicle that I would like to to have. Now here's what I look for when I am buying a car. First of all I'm not a car mechanic.

I don't enjoy it. I'm not into it. But I can carry a flashlight and I can look under the hood. So even being relatively uneducated the first thing I do is just simply pop the hood with engine cold if possible. Pop the hood and look at everything. Especially look at belts and hoses.

Look at a belt see is the belt in good condition. Hoses are there is the rubber good etc. Look for oil. I use a flashlight look down on the bottom of the engine look all around on the suspension parts is there excessive amounts of oil. Then get down and look under the car look at the CV boots.

The boots on the CV axles and see is there are these is the rubber good is it is it clean are these new or are these falling apart is there is there excessive oil under the car somehow. Take a look just at the physical appearance of things. Smell for anything weird and then start turn the car on and listen.

Look for smoke look for noises that you consider and hear and then take it on a drive and see what it feels. And that's about as far as you need to go at least with your ability. Now you can have a mechanic inspect it and that's always a recommendation.

But over time you can I think learn to do your own inspections as well. I've had enough mechanics inspect things that you kind of get a sense of what they're doing. I remember this when I bought my first RV I took the mechanic and I just watched him do his inspection and then I got to the point where okay I could repeat that and I can understand what the mechanic did and then I can repeat how he did his inspection.

I'm not going to be as good as he is but if I I build a little bit more skill. So if it's your first time take the car to a mechanic arrange that with a seller that I'd like to have my mechanic inspect it have it inspected and just ask him what are you looking for when you do the actual inspection and then learn from the process.

And so I the other thing that I'm looking for is as I said the story. So think about all the communication and get a sense of what's the story. I looked at one Kia Carnival that I thought was okay but the story wasn't making sense to me. The vehicle was cheap in fact it was one of the cheapest ones that I found.

It was okay mechanically I didn't find any glaring errors with it but the story didn't make sense. The guy said he bought it for his wife asked him how long have you had it. Now maybe this was a lost in translation problem because he's speaking in Portuguese and I'm speaking in Spanish and you know there's some crossover lap but the end of the day you know I could have misunderstood him but he told me that he bought the car for his wife a month or two ago but it was too big for her and so I said well what did you get in exchange.

Well I got her a little itty bitty car so why are you selling it. Well I need the money. Like nothing made sense it wasn't a story that made sense. Normal people don't go and buy their wives a minivan with seven seats and then she decides oh it is indeed too big and then turn around and buy her a tiny car a month later.

That doesn't make sense. Maybe you go from a full-size car to a medium-size car maybe you go from a minivan to a large SUV but you don't go from a minivan to a tiny little car without some more explanation. So there were other things as well but you just get a sense this doesn't feel right and I walked away.

When I got to the vehicle that I ended up buying everything made sense. Just ticked all the boxes etc. So the way I do it is ask your questions multiple times multiple ways. So if you study interrogation techniques how does an interrogator get somebody to tell them that they're lying.

Well you usually get it by getting the person to tell you what happened and then you talk a little bit and then you get the person to tell you what happened. And it's very difficult if somebody is making up a story for all the little details to match between those things.

And so if you're a sharp listener you can always hear the discrepancies and then understand what's happening and you can get a sense as the whole story fit. In this case as soon as I got in the car I knew this is a good car and the story fit and now it's just a matter of arranging the details.

In terms of pricing what I have found to be effective in terms of pricing is to recognize I don't always want to have the cheapest car. With a used vehicle that's what I tried to say earlier and I got a little sidetracked forgive me. With a used vehicle saving $500 on the front end is not nearly as important as getting a good car because you'll spend $500 on a single mechanical visit to the mechanic.

One of the biggest vehicle mistakes I made was a few years ago I bought a van. I bought a cheap van. I was tickled pink with my deal. I thought I'd gotten the deal of the century and I inspected it. Everything looked great. Everything seemed to make sense but then the van wasn't working.

And I wound up spending I think I bought the van for like $2,500. I wound up spending $3,500 on the mechanic just trying to get the thing going. It never could get going. Sold it. Took a loss on it and went on with my life. The point is that mechanic bills can add up quickly.

That was why I said with my friend who's got the minivan why would I'll happily pay you $1,000 more than the dealer will pay you and pay you today any day you decide you want to sell the car because that $1,000 for a vehicle that I know is taken care of will be far cheaper than just a couple of new parts bolted out in time.

I've learned to not take the lower end of the market if it can be avoided. I didn't mind looking at the most expensive minivan that was listed there because the van had enough of the features, the extras that made it justified. It was in good condition and somebody who prices their vehicle like that who's not a dealer knows that this is a quality vehicle.

Whenever I've gone to sell a vehicle private party I always price it where I think the market deserves to be. And if I'm confident that my vehicle's a good vehicle I'm going to put a decent price on it. So I don't mind buying a more expensive vehicle. The overall price is going to be beat down by the market itself.

I didn't check Blue Book. I don't know if Blue Book, I assume Europe probably has one. I didn't do the research to find out. I knew because I looked at several competitors. I knew what these things are going for. I knew this one's a little bit more but I looked at it and I said everything about this makes sense.

This car has the marks of a well taken care of car. The whole story, I'll skip the whole back story, but the whole story clicks. Everything makes sense about this. So I then asked them, now price negotiation. What can you do in price negotiation? Best thing you can do is just ask when someone's selling you something, ask them if they can lower the price.

You don't need to do any kind of games or anything silly. Just ask them to lower the price. And so if someone's asking, in my case $42.50 for a car, then just say can you do anything lower than that? Can you do anything better than that? If someone says in a real negotiation, you don't be the first one to say the number, just ask, can you do any better than that?

Not going to hurt you if they can't, you're not offending anyone. But most people will come off a price a little bit quickly if you just say, hey, can you do any better than that? And then in this case, I decided that my negotiation, I wanted to negotiate on terms, not on price.

So in a negotiation, there are usually multiple things that you can negotiate. Put simply, we can call it price or we can call it terms. In the car marketplace, you see dealers do this all the time. They come to you and say, well, you know, this car is $19,995 or it's $199 a month.

Well, you can negotiate those terms. And for one guy, the $19,995 is a better deal than $199 a month. For another guy, the $19,999 a month is a vastly better deal because he's got that. He doesn't have the $19,995. And so then when you get into the details, you can negotiate on length of term, length of payments or interest rate.

And you can go through and negotiate all the terms. And so I pretty quickly agreed to the seller's price because in my experience, people who have a high quality product sometimes don't like too much to be beaten up on price. And so my interest with this car was not to get the cheapest deal, saving $200 when I've got a rental car sitting there, you know, $70 a day.

That's not the most important thing. The most important thing is not saving, getting, saying, OK, I saved $200. It's actually to get somebody who will help me close the deal quickly. And so I negotiated on terms and I said, you know, here's the deal. I'm an American tourist buying the car and I want to pay with this method of payment.

I want to do the deal in this terms. And here's my I need you to work with me to help me get the registration done, help me with language, etc. And so we were able to negotiate on terms. And then the other thing is once you've agreed to price, if you're going to renegotiate price or negotiate price, let the car negotiate the price.

Go and do your inspection. And if you find some problems, you come back and say, listen, I was going to pay you $4000 for the car, but the inspection found this, this, this, this, this. I can't do that. You know, the estimate here is this is going to cost me X number of dollars.

If I pay this price to you, it's just it's just not fair. I can't do it. And so that's a much more worthwhile technique, negotiation technique than than the alternate than trying just to beat someone up on the front end of a price. The final bit of language that I'll share with you is language that's been useful to me.

I believe that honesty in all dealings is the best policy. And so language that I have used successfully is with a buyer is just simply to say what I told you. I was like, hey, listen, this is a really nice car. You know, I like the car a lot.

I'd like to buy it. This is a really good car. And I don't think your price is unfair. I think that if you wait a little bit longer, you'll probably find someone who could come along and pay this price that you're asking for the car. But I can't personally pay the price.

But what I can pay is this. And I got the money right here. If you'd like to sell it today, I'd be happy to to buy it today. And I found that's just a simple, honest, truthful scenario. If you find a nice car and you say this car probably is worth this, you're not wrong.

You haven't insulted anybody. You're being honest, but you're also being honest. I'm not going to pay that price. I'm happy to pay this price and I'm happy to close today. I'm happy to hand you the money right now. And so that's useful, a little bit of language that I have found to be helpful to me.

At the end of the day, then it's just a matter of arranging the details. When and where am I going to drive it home? How are we going to arrange the title transfer? In my case, with it being Portugal, I needed the seller's help to do all of that.

We needed to figure out money conversion, currency conversions. We needed to figure out the actual registration process. I needed some handholding in that. And so that was another reason why I wasn't in this transaction, wasn't too worried about price, not being an expert, not being a local, figuring things out.

I needed someone who would be willing to do a few extra things for me. And I just picture the price as being a little bit of a consulting fee. Don't get me wrong. I got some negotiations on the price. I got the price pulled off a decent amount. I was happy with to account for a couple of things.

But what was more important was I got a smooth transaction and I made a friend out of the deal. And I think it's the point of a win-win deal is that my goal in any transaction anywhere is to make it a win-win deal. I want people to feel like they win from doing business with me and that I win from doing business with them.

And I want us to part as friends. So that is how I accomplished the purchase of a car. I'll let you know if it turns out to be right or wrong. I did miss one thing on the vehicle that being fixed quite literally as we speak or as I record anyway.

And that was my mistake. I missed one small thing, but it's no big deal. I expected to do that. And that's the other thing is that when you buy a used car, at least for me, when I buy a used car, I'm going to expect to change some things.

I knew I had to put new tires on it. No big deal. I put new tires on it. A lot of times it's just maintenance items that have piled up. So new tires, new wipers, new battery, all that stuff that adds up. So just make sure you keep your budget available.

And as I've stated in the standalone show, always budget for the accessories. If you've got $500 to do something, then spend $300 on the primary thing and then spend $200 on the accessories that you need in order to do the thing that you want to do. Don't max your budget out on the thing itself.

Plan for the accessories and the service and all that stuff that makes the thing useful. But that's how I did it. I think the biggest tool is just use Facebook Marketplace and let the algorithm help you. And I think you'll find good success. Cars. I've changed the way that I talk about cars.

I used to be on the standard personal finance bandwagon of cars are so expensive and moderate the amount of money that you spend on. That's true. That's true. I've over the years, I've counseled a lot of people and their cars are just destroying their net worth. It's true. However, as I have increasingly worked with, studied and learned from wealthier people, maybe it's just me that's changing.

But for a wealthy person, meaning a high income earner or a wealthy person, your car is not going to make a meaningful difference in your overall financial plan. So just make sure that you buy the kind of car that's not going to make a meaningful difference in your overall financial plan.

And so I'm less on the car bandwagon than I once was. Hopefully I can that I'm expressing that clearly. If you're earning twenty thousand dollars a year working as an entry level waiter in a restaurant, don't go out and buy a new car. Nothing meaningful is going to come from your career because of the fact that you went out and bought a new car, build your career first and figure out how to go from twenty to two hundred thousand dollars a year and invest into yourself.

Go car free when you're twenty grand. But if you're on the trajectory where your your income is growing, then just be thoughtful. Don't waste money. But the car doesn't have to be something that you stress about. It doesn't have to be a major factor in your overall financial situation.

I think that if you're worried about the cost of gas, if you're worried about the cost of a car, I don't mean this to sound arrogant, but I think you're doing it wrong. Change the choices that you make so that you can do business in a in a sense where you don't worry about the cost of the car and you don't worry about the cost of the gas.

The reason I wanted a budget three to five thousand dollars for a vehicle to drive around Europe was because I viewed that as throwaway money. Not that I want to throw away three to five thousand dollars, but I'm comparing it to the alternative, comparing it to Ubers, I'm comparing it to renting a car, etc.

And so I'm just saying this is the amount of money that I'm comfortable spending as throwaway money. So if it all disappears, I'm OK. And when you do that over time and you make choices where you don't stretch your capacity, then you can focus and go back to other things.

The biggest cost for me, the car has not been the money. The biggest cost of the car has been simply the time invested in getting it done. I've lost basically a week in getting all the details done. I've gotten some work done, but still I'm sitting here on Friday afternoon waiting for the tires to be finished on it.

And so that's an expensive cost to lose a week of productivity because you're going looking at cars. That's much more expensive to me than the money. And more and more, I'm realizing that one of my biggest financial mistakes has been and still is choosing time, costly frugality as compared to simply spending money in order to reclaim time.

And so I've been trying to analyze how I'm using my time and realize that frugality that requires time is often not been the best solution. Even in this whole thing, I wondered maybe I should have just gone with a brand new Renault with a three month lease or whatever.

In my case, it didn't seem like the right thing to do. But probably next time I'll do things that maximize time more and more. Because when you realize how precious time is, then it seems really foolish to squander it. And I've squandered too much of it in my life.

On that note, thank you for listening. I wish you good Friday and I will be back with you very soon. Sweet Hop is an online marketplace curating the best in premium seating at stadiums, arenas and amphitheaters nationwide with Sweet Hop's 100% ticket guarantee, no hidden fees and the personal high level service you expect with a premium purchase.

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