My New "Love"

I wasn't going to buy a car, let alone a new car, so soon, but David insisted that I get it taken care of as soon as possible. Matter of fact, he refused to consider paying off the house until I had purchased another car. I knew he was serious, so I got serious about looking.

I swear, buying cars these days is so much better than it used to be when you had to sit at the dealership for hours on end negotiating and waiting and negotiating and waiting. I hated that so much, even though David was the one who always handled the negotiating. But with the internet, you can do all of the negotiating via e-mail. It's awesome.

So, first I decided that Subaru had proved their reliability and safety so I was going to stick with Subaru. Then I did some searching through autotrader.com, kbb.com, and cargurus.com to see what kind of inventory was within a 500 mile radius of where I live. I sent out some e-mail inquiries to the dealerships that had cars that cargurus had identified as "hot buys". Then I waited for the responses.

While I was waiting, I went to the local Subaru dealership to drive a couple of different Subaru models that I was interested in. Carson really wanted me to look at the Impreza and David wanted me to stick with the Legacy. And I wanted to check out the Crosstrek. While the Impreza and Crosstrek were fun to drive and were more "dog-friendly", neither one had a power seat that could be adjusted up and down. Their seats do go up and down, but you have to manually jack them up or down and since there is a big discrepancy between where I have to have the seat and where the rest of the drivers in our family need the seat, the lack of a power seat was a dealer breaker. So I was back to the Legacy.

Initially I had inquired regarding used cars, but the inventory was low. And because of the law of supply and demand, low inventory means little to no negotiation on prices. That was frustrating. I tried everything to get people to move, but they were pretty set on the listed price. There was a small glimmer of hope for buying a used car when I found two dealers who had service vehicle loaners that had just rotated out of their fleet that were available for purchase. Unfortunately, by this time I had broken Dave Ramsey's number one rule (don't drive cars outside of your price range) and had fallen in love with a new 2015 Subaru Legacy 2.5i Limited.

So knowing that I was out of my price range, I had to negotiate hard. I found a dealer in Lewiston, ID who had what I wanted with all of the bells and whistles and so I pitted them against the local dealership where I had test driven the car. Kendall Subaru in Lewiston was hungry for my business and would have done just about anything to get my business, unfortunately, they couldn't speed up delivery of the car and that was the deal breaker. I wound up going with the local dealership; however, if I wasn't in a time crunch for a car, I would have gone with Kendall. They were that great to work with. And I anticipate that our next purchase (whenever that may be), will be with them.

The silver lining with Kendall's eagerness to have my business, is that I was able to get the local dealership way below where they wanted to be because they were desperate to beat Kendall. I got the car for below invoice price and had $500 worth of options added at no charge. I felt pretty great about successfully negotiating this deal all on my own.

And I am in love with my new Subaru.