Negotiating when buying a car can be one experience that would-be new car owners dread the most. A wrong decision could cause them to spend tens of thousands of dollars without getting real value or benefit. Most of the stress and the anxiety come from the fact that dealers are always at advantage. They are more knowledgeable and more experienced in negotiation. It is important to know customers should always be in control of the negotiation and they shouldn’t allow dealers to take the initiative. It is important for people to avoid being intimidated and once they see that a dealer starts to intimidate, it is a good thing consider choosing other dealers. In general, the negotiation process should leave a good impression and in the end, the car owner would be able to drive home happy. There should be a pre-shopping conversation with the spouse on the amount of maximum budget that can be implemented. It is important to calculate how much down payment that we can afford. Far too many people experience stress while in the showroom, because they experience stress of being intimidated.
We should have the confidence of knowing that we are able to get certain car at our preset budget. We should be able to reject any kind of misleading offers, because we are already fully knowledgeable about the car that we want to buy. We should keep all the deal focused on the total selling price of the car. If we are certain that we want to buy a car in specific dealership, we should be ready to spend more than two hours during the negotiation process. If we couldn’t agree on a price or specific terms, we should still be prepared to choose other dealerships. In many cases, the dealer would agree to some or all of our proposed terms when we are about to walk away from the negotiation. It may seem like fun to take younger children in the dealership, because they are excited with the new car. However, in some cases, children would get bored quickly and they could end up becoming a distraction during the negotiation process. We should know that we are making a significant financial decision and we should completely be focused on this task.
When the negotiation has entered a technical phase and everyone starts to run the numbers, we should get multiple quotes for each scenario. As an example, we should know about the amount of monthly payment without down payment, maximum down payment and 50 percent down payment. Ask for the dealer to give us time to calculate things and find out, which scenario that could give us the most benefits.