How Much is Your Used Car Worth?

Assessing your vehicle's actual value

Don Fuller / autoMedia.com

Typically, a person shopping for a new, or newer, car is currently driving something he or she is planning to use as a trade-in. This brings up the big question: What's it worth?

This often becomes a very tricky issue. Everyone, naturally, wants as much as possible. For the moment, let's put aside any concerns of what you may owe on your used car. You may, in fact, owe more than it's worth, which would not necessarily put you among the minority of car owners. Let's look, for now, at simply assessing the vehicle's value.

Everything's Relative

One place to start is the auto trader-type magazines, available at any convenience store. The information in these publications should be considered as very, very rough outlines only. Most of the vehicles are privately owned, which means most of them are being advertised for sale by people who are amateurs in the car trading business. This means, when we're researching these vehicles and prices, what we're really dealing with is vehicles of unknown background, with asking prices set by a lot of people who may not know what they're talking about. In other words, we're dealing with a lot of hopes and dreams, misconceptions, old baggage and sometimes flat-out lies.

Remember, these are asking prices only. If you use these numbers as guidelines to set the price of your own used car, we now have a multiplicity of misinformation. Yet, it's amazing how many folks will walk onto a dealership lot with such a number in mind as to what they want for their used car in trade—and they're not going to budge an inch.

Be Realistic

Or you could look in the Sunday paper classified ad section. These prices tend to be somewhat lower than the auto trader-type publications. Or you could get onto the Internet, which can be just one more place where somebody will kid himself about the value of the vehicle he's been driving. Typically, these sources will first ask for an assessment of the car's condition. For example: Is it Excellent, Good, Fair or Poor? Almost everyone will overrate his or her car. So, here's a tip: If you describe it as excellent, it better be really, really excellent. No excuses, no little problems, no dents, no dings, no scrapes, nothing missing, everything works. It better be clean as a whistle. It had better be washed, scrubbed and neat as a pin. No dirty carpets, no junk in the trunk, no doughnut crumbs in the seats. Otherwise, it's not "excellent."