We purchased a 2009 Toyota Highlander for my family. While it is a five year old vehicle, it’s still new to us. My wife and I have never owned a Toyota. We like it and we hear it should last us another 200,000 miles as long as we maintain it properly.
I wanted to tell you all that we went through an auto buying service through one of the member companies to which we belong. I do not want to say the name right now for two reasons. One, I’m a superstitious person. So I don’t want to recommend the company to you, and then all of a sudden the vehicle which I just bought breaks-down. I know…that’s silly. The second reason is that they are not paying me to promote them. Maybe that will happen one day, but then when they do, how can you trust that what I say about that company is purely objective?
I digress. I am telling you about the member company’s buying program because it really did take the stress out of buying the car for us. I did look at the blue book value and I believe the price we got was fair and below retail book. Also the GAP insurance was only 1.5 percent of the purchase price, so it was cheap. The person that was helping us did try to talk us out of GAP because we were buying the car below book value, but I had to remind him that both my wife and I are claims adjusters, and we have seen what happens when a person doesn’t buy GAP insurance. Usually there is an accident that happens very soon after the purchase. Remember what I mentioned earlier, I am a superstitious person. We are financing the vehicle so there is some interest that adds to our amount owed to the bank that if an accident happens, we would have to pay, so why not get GAP? We obtained a good rate on the financing though through the member buying program, 2.05 percentage points lower than what my wife’s bank wanted to give us. If you are in the market for a new or used car, you might want to see if any membership programs that you may be a part of offer this type of service. Also, see if your employer offers any discounts for purchases of new vehicles from any car manufacturers. Some companies do, but employees wouldn’t know if they don’t check their company’s benefit offerings.
