Buying a Car

I've purchased a lot of cars in my life, over 20, and now I'm working on yet another one. Tia has been searching for a car for Kyle and we had a fairly narrow set of criteria. Less than $6k, less than 90k miles, relatively close to us, a smaller car, and we ended up with Jettas, Cavaliers, and a few other models that are virtually indistinquishable. Knowing roughly what car you want helps, but these days searching on general criteria works well.

We initially started on cars.com, but expanded to Craigslist as well since that has a bunch of private owned cars. Cars.com seems to be dominated by dealers over the last year or two.

So she called on a few, talked to some people and I went to look at one last night. It was a stick, which she can't really drive with her ankle, so I drove out to the west side of Englewood last night as the sun was fading to look at a car. I walked up to the house, spoke to the owner, who turned out isn't the owner, but selling it for a friend. That sounds a little shady, but it happens.

The car looked good, no leaks I could see, it's clean, in decent shape, apparently was wrecked since it has a salvage title and she admitted the front end had some work done. I drove it down the block for 10 minutes, got through all the gears, jerked the clutch, half pushed it and rev'd it, checked the AC and heat, everything seemed to work.

So I took it back and arranged for an inspection today. I got a call from the owner and then called the shop to arrange payment. We'll see what they say and need to do some research on salvaged titles, but hopefully this will work out.