When is it considered a good time to trade in?

[nemelek]

Buying and selling cars is expensive. Taxes and other fee will never be recouped. The longer you keep a car the more it pays for it’s self. I had a 88 Toyota truck I bought for 12k and sold 18 years later for 3k. The truck cost $500/year. (12 - 3 /18) A lot depends on the skill of the person doing the deal. Paying too much in the first place or wanting a new car so bad that a fair trade in value wasn’t achieved will cost a person money. Trading a car in will cost more than selling it on your own.

I have owned over 25 cars in my life time. When buying a used car I always looked for low miles. I would never buy a car that averaged over 10,000 miles/year. To me a car that is 4-5 years old with 40,000-50,000 miles is the best used car buy. Therefore the worst time to sell a car. I bought a 4 year old Honda DelSol and drove it 2 years 20,000 miles and sold it for $200 more than I paid for it. I bought my wife a 4 year old BMW Z-3 with 14,000 miles. Sold it 3 years later to a privet party with 29,000 miles for $1,500 less than I paid. Trading the car in would have cost 6,000 less than I paid.

I have traded cars in before. I traded in a 92 Lexus with a bad transmission for the Yaris. The transmission would have cost 3-4k to fix. I would have felt bad selling it to a privet party. In Colorado the difference between sale price and trade in is what we are taxed on. At 7.5% that can be a consideration.

The cost of transportation is expensive. Gas, deprecation, insurance, maintenance, purchase price, mods and things all add to the cost. Some people are willing to pay the price and drive a new car every 2 years. Others will buy used and hold on to the car for 10 or more years.

[brainless twit]

In my opinion, the right time to trade a car is when it's falling apart and you absolutely MUST buy a new one.

I drove my Honda Accord until I couldn't trust it to go more than 20 miles or so. No A/C, no speedometer/temp gauge, drinking oil, would only start when it felt like it... It wasn't uncommon to find myself stranded at the grocery store for a few hours until it would run long enough to pull out of the parking spot. Sure, I only got about $500 for the poor thing, but I hadn't had a car payment in seven years.

[tomato]

Originally Posted by nemelek

Buying and selling cars is expensive. Taxes and other fee will never be recouped. The longer you keep a car the more it pays for it’s self. I had a 88 Toyota truck I bought for 12k and sold 18 years later for 3k. The truck cost $500/year. (12 - 3 /18) A lot depends on the skill of the person doing the deal. Paying too much in the first place or wanting a new car so bad that a fair trade in value wasn’t achieved will cost a person money. Trading a car in will cost more than selling it on your own.

I have owned over 25 cars in my life time. When buying a used car I always looked for low miles. I would never buy a car that averaged over 10,000 miles/year. To me a car that is 4-5 years old with 40,000-50,000 miles is the best used car buy.
...

The cost of transportation is expensive. Gas, deprecation, insurance, maintenance, purchase price, mods and things all add to the cost.

I'm with you!

Most people I talk to also say that I shouldn't have bought a car with so many miles.
I didn't think it mattered in my case because
1) it's a Toyota, made to last long, probably will go over 200,000 miles
2) she looks like she's in excellent condition and passed the mechanical inspection like a little champ
3) I don't drive as much as I used to, so I will not be adding a lot of miles myself.
4) Frankly for me, compared to the other cars I've driven and owned, 55K is very low!!

I figured that if I keep the Yaris a couple of years, then it would have the "normal amount of miles" for a car her age, but would still be in excellent shape because I don't drive her too much, so hopefully wouldn't depreciate all that much.

Of course, I might have reasoned differently if I still lived out in the Country, where I used to drive on average 50 to 100 miles a day.

I also thought of keeping my old Honda, too but I had started to spend some serious maintenance money already. It cost me close to $1000 in repairs in December (blew a radiator in traffic right on the Bridge going to SF and the cooling system had to be changed, among other things). The timing belt was overdue, plus she needed tires, had carburetor problems, and of course no guarantee that she would pass the SMOG test, so faced with that, and based on the fact that the economy is making it hard to find good used cars right now, I decided to take a chance w the Yaris instead.

I saw the later post suggesting modifications. I guess that's a possibility, too, but mods add up as well, like you said, and since I don't have the skill to do it myself, I don't know if it's a good idea in my case.