For me, the two things about being an adult that I painfully dread are buying/selling a house and trading cars. I have rarely had good experiences with either. When the time comes my anxiety is extremely high. I wish someone could just put me to sleep and when I wake up it is all done.
Recently, we have come to the place where we needed to decide about our automobile. The manufacturer warranty is going to run out soon and any future repairs would be costly. We decided to trade.
I can never understand why it takes so long to get this process done. It has always been where the salesman gives the estimate but then when you go to the finance person, the price zooms out of the range you were expecting. Adding this and adding that and a lot of things you really don’t need but you feel like you have to have. It’s crazy.
Once the salesman asked what payments I was wanting. Later, the payment turned out to be far out of range that I could afford. I told the salesman that it wasn’t anywhere near any ballpark. I learned early on that they can deceive you. I will be fair and not lump all cars sales people in the same boat but I have encountered many. I just don’t like the whole process. I have spent an entire day in a dealership which is totally ridiculous.
In my world, I would go to the dealership and pick out a car and test drive it, if I liked it then I would go to a kiosk and select what I wanted and enter all of my information. (Each car could be assigned to a salesman so I wouldn’t want to cut them out.) Then just sign everything electronically and leave with the car. None of this waiting for the next person to do something. In this day of the technology that we have, there is no reason this couldn’t be done.
Again, I’m not saying ALL car salesman or finance people are bad. I’m mostly saying the process could be improved.
We will talk about buying/selling a house in another blog.
