R2I - CARS

Around the same time, i started the process of selling our cars. You cannot take cars from US to India (left hand and right hand drive difference) even if you are willing to pay the extra duty. Also cars is India are much more expensive than in US (and have much less features). However there no other alternative and so we had to sell our beloved cars. there is a delicate balance between selling things too soon (and having to deal with the subsequent inconvenience) and selling them too late (and having to deal with the stress and price reductions). Fortunately for cars, we were able to sell them at the right time. All thanks to autotrader.com. We had 2 cars - 2010 Prius and 2004 Honda Pilot. We wanted to sell Prius earlier since we needed the bigger car for running errands and getting things. Also we figured it would be easier to sell an older car than an almost brand new one. I put up Prius for sale on craiglist towards end of july. Selling cars valued more than 5K on craiglist is not very easy in my experience. I got a lot of responses (about 5 or so over 5 days), but almost everyone wanted to bargain a lot. Some of the requests for price reductions were really ridiculous. I wasted a lot of time on this. Next week we put up the ad on autotrader. com. I paid about $90 for a premium ad and got 1 response after 3 days. However i sold my car to that respondent without much bargaining (just came $500 below my asking price). The whole process was very smooth and stress free. This is because even buyers have to pay to get the details of cars on sale. This results in buyers who are very interested in purchasing the car rather than bargain hunters. Had a similar experience with our other car. I put up that car for sale just after mid aug confident that i would be able to sell it in a week. Again a similar experience on craiglist. I got a lot more responses and the best one was about 2K below my asking price (which was already lower than the KBB price since I wanted to sell soon). I then put it on auto trader and i got a response after 3 days. This time the buyer come over to take a look, test drove it and bought it without any price adjustment. It seemed too good to be true. The only hitch was that he was taking a loan from bank and the bank would be issuing us a check. After 1 anxious day, everything was cleared. This was the smoothest experience that we had with a car sale. Also we sold our car just 4 days before we left seattle. Although that was cutting it a bit too close, it served us well in the end. A word of advice here is to follow the tips on autotrader.com for creating the right ad, be truthful about the car condition and price it appropriately (i put it up for a few hundred dollars below the KBB price). Also be ready to bargain and go about 1K less than your asking price (especially if you want to sell it soon). Have carfax report with you and send it electronically to interested respondants. And blindly put it on autotrader.com (the extra $100 would be worth the extra effort and stress that you would avoid).  For the last 4 days we rented a convertible and enjoyed the sunny weather of seattle summer. It felt amazing to drive a convertible for the last few days in seattle though a bit odd to have 2 car seats in the back seat.