Baby, You Can Buy My Car

When we moved to Seattle, Mr. Goodlaff was able to telecommute.  Once I got a job, I drove the car, he stayed home, and all was well in the land of auto.  A few months ago, Mr. Goodlaff got a new job about 25 miles away.  Sadly, this means no more working in his pajamas, but it also means we needed another car.

We investigated public transportation.  If I had my druthers, I would never drive.  When living in China, I took the bus and subway everywhere, and I loved it.  We looked at taking public transportation here, but it was inconvenient, impractical, and a pain in the ass. So, we decided on another car.

I've already established that there are certain life experiences I missed out on because my dad fixed and provided my cars.  Buying a car is one of them.

One of our saving graces was that we did a ton of online research prior to buying.  We looked at a ton of cars and even more dealerships.  We read reviews.  We did price comparison.  We checked the Carfax.  Eventually we found one car that we liked and wanted to look at.  It had a clean bill of health--no accidents--and had always been serviced at the dealership that was selling it.  It was in great condition, and had a good price, so we went to the dealership early one Saturday morning to take a look. 

We were greeted the second we stepped out of our car, and told Voss (our salesman) that we wanted to look at the car we'd seen online.  He pulled it out, we gave it a once over, took a test drive, and we really liked it.  In fact, I was trying really hard to show how much I liked it.  We decided to deal.

The best thing that Mr. Goodlaff and I did before walking into the dealership was settle on our maximum price.  Then we settled our our real maximum price.  Sound confusing?  Let me explain...We came up with the number that we would tell the dealer was our top price, but we also came up with our real maximum--our "walking away from the table no matter what" maximum, if you will.  We went back and forth on price, and finally settled somewhere in between our two numbers. 

It took us another hour after we came to an agreement to hash it out with finance and dodge all the warranty upsells.  But just a few hours after we decided on a price, we drove away in a new (to us) car.

And she's beautiful!



This is Luna.  Luna is a Honda Accord, and we have been getting along very, very well.  She has very dark windows;  I didn't like them at first, but now they've grown on me. 

I can't say that the process of buying a car was fun, but overall, I'm pretty satisfied with the results!

Adult experience number 372...check!