Contents

Buying a Car in the 21st Century
Choosing the right car for you
Choosing the Right Technology
Comparing your Top Choices for cars
Making the Final Decision for cars
Research about your dream car
How to gather Anecdotal Information
Choice reevaluation for cars
How to do test drive
Now Ready to Buy
Your Trade In
To buy Dream Car Online
How to make the system Work for You
To get the Best Financing
Car Warranties
Car Insurance
Checklist for cars
What to do after dream car purchase
Considerations for used cars
How to sell old car







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At this point I’m going to suggest using old-fashioned techniques to keep your information organized. Get a 3” three-ring binder and a set of dividers. You might also want to buy some of those plastic-pocket pages (3-hole punched) to go in the binder – these pages are good for storing newspaper and magazine clippings. Remember to date and put the source on any material you cut from magazines and/or newspapers.

Create a section in the binder – using the dividers – for each of your chosen cars. Within the section for each car, again using dividers, you are going to create several subsections. Instructions on each of these subsections follow.

Specifications* – using the manufacturer site or the specific model page review the specifications for your chosen car(s). Print out any of the specs that are important to you (for example perhaps fuel economy is important but dimensions are not – you could print out the former but not the latter).

Options Available* - again, by looking at the manufacturer or specific model page determine if options that are important to you are available. You may wish to create a simple list (see example below) to track whether each car has the options you want or simply print out the applicable web page information.

Table III

Safety* - go to NHTSA and pull up results for your chosen car. If none are available look for the previous year’s model and if it is similarly configured and doesn’t seem to be drastically different from this year’s model use those safety results.

Reliability* - read over this article to learn about reliability and use this section of the MSN Autos site to look for reliability information on previous years’ models. Print out any reliability information that is pertinent.  

Insurance Costs* - check out this Money Central article for information on what influences insurance costs and how to lower your insurance premiums. For actual costs go to any (or all) of the sites on our Insurance page. Print out copies of your quotes.

Ownership costs* - these are difficult to quantify but reading this article may give you some idea how your selected car rates in terms of overall ownership cost.

Also create sections for Anecdotal Information, Test Drives, Current Deals and Quotes. You’ll put information in these sections later.