Man, trading in an old car is TEMPING. You just get to LEAVE IT there. You don’t have to worry about all this unknown hassle. Cleaning it, listing it, how to sell it… taxes?! Title?! Who knows how to do that stuff?! You just get to DUMP IT and take the cash. So tempting. We strongly considered it.

But then we stepped back and thought about what is REALLY involved to sell it. It’s not much. You clean it (or pay someone to), take photos, write an ad, post it on a couple site. The buyer shows up with cash, you google “how to sell car in [my state]” and follow the few steps it says to sign over the title, then drop the cash at the bank.

I maybe spent three hours on all of the steps above. The car was gone about a week after we got the offer from CarMax. For my three hours of work, we walked away with $3,200 more than the CarMax offer after the cost of cleaning.

Am I, with a net worth of over $5M, in a position to turn down 3 hours of (fun, easy) work for $1,000/hour. I don’t think so! There aren’t many hours of my life I’m producing more value than that, so I went for it.

We were also concerned about selling a car with mechanical problems. Let’s let CarMax handle it! So much easier! Instead, we just were hyper-transparent on the ad, listing all the good and bad things we could think of with the car. We figured the engine needed a serious repair that would be a couple thousand dollars, so we listed for about $3,000 less than the going rate. I posted to Craigslist, OfferUp, and Facebook Marketplace. These were the approximate number of replies from each:

Craigslist: 3
OfferUp: 10
Facebook Marketplace: 75

So even listing all the problems, we got a TON of interest, and honestly probably under priced it by at least $1,000. But the buyer was thrilled, he did some work on cars himself so felt good about addressing the issues. We got a great price too. Win/win!

Do you trade in your old cars?

As always, reminding you to build wealth by following the two PFC rules: 1.) Live below your means and 2.) Invest early and often.

-Jeremy