The Math it Hurts so Good

The math didn’t click until I was talking to Dealers about getting proposals. This was the day before I was planning to buy. I was told 3 things in those conversations:

“Just add $500” “GAP is offered at $900, but I have a 25% off” “Dont worry about GAP only the car price.”

That’s IT!

This helped me fill in two of my spreadsheets.

First, when I was getting the proposals, some dealers give me the $1500 off price and others would give me both. I could use the “Just add $500” to each of the deal columns to get the price.

In my “Sheet 4: Call Dealers” I would have completed columns of:
OTD $1500
OTD 0% + $1500

I now had a list of my proposals from each of the Dealers they would give me with no negotiation.

Second, I could fill in my “Sheet 1: Interest Calc” spreadsheet with 2 columns:
Deal 1: 1.49% + $1500
Deal 2: 0% + $1000

	1.24% + $1,500	0%  + $1,000
Car OTD Price	$26,500	$27,000
Interest Paid	$1,015.82	0
GAP	$345	$900
Total Price	$27,861	$27,900

You can see the “Car Price” changes the exact amount if the Cashback by $500. The interest paid is accounted for. And my currently quoted GAP was also accounted for.

NOW with the “winning” Dealer, I could compare ONLY the financial deals with confidence. There was no noise of deal confusion, car price, or anything else.

This Dealer reminded me that even GAP insurance is negotiable! Thank you!

Having this, and fully understanding where all the numbers came from, made it exciting to get to the dealer with my offers.

I could SEE that there was only a $39 difference between the Financial deals. And as it stood the 0% was NOT the best offer I had.

Don’t walk in blind when you can see clearly.