Sidestepping Car Salesmen Tricks

When what's left of your car loan is worth a lot then what your car is worth - when you are upside down on your car loan, to use the lingo - it can be very difficult to  sell that car and and then to buy a new one. At this point, you will come upon one of the more infamous car salesmen tricks out there - a salesman at the dealership offers to pay off your old car just like that. He will pay it off no matter how much money it is.

You might feel like taking them on their offer. You know that there are car salesmen tricks out there that you have aware of, but what could possibly be fishy about this, you wonder.

Well, what's fishy is the that car salesman doesn't intend to pay it off at all. What they actually do is that they assess how much they will lose if they take your old car and sell it and then use the money to pay off your loan. Whatever they have to pay out-of-pocket, they will surreptitiously add that sum of money to your new car loan. And they'll never tell you about it. So it's a very bad deal.

There have been plenty of car dealerships - Hyundai dealerships in particular - that have been sued by the FTC for this. The dealerships for their part, claim that they haven't done anything wrong. But they promise that they won't advertise in this fashion ever again.

You need to be sure that you don't ever fall for this kind of cheap trick by the car dealerships. The first thing you need to be able to do to sidestep these car salesmen tricks is that you need to know if you are upside down on your car loan.

To do this is pretty simple. You just need to look up Kelley Blue Book, find out how much your car is worth on the market now, and then look at your loan documentation to find out how much you owe still. If what you owe there is more than what you car is worth according to Kelley Blue Book, you may consider yourself upside down. This isn't the end of the world.

Most people are upside down. It's only a problem if you need to buy a new car. If your existing cars and in good enough condition to give you any service there's no reason to care. All you need to do is to keep driving the car until the car is worth less than what you owe on it. And then, you can sell it to everyone else.

It's always a very bad idea to combine buying a new car with selling your old car and getting financing for the new car. Doing three things at one time can turn out to be hugely complicated. It gives the dealer all kinds of ways in which to hide deceptive activity.