Quote Originally Posted by iris lilies View Post
Catherine, that was indeed ridiculous. Is there a reason why you didn’t grab it from the curb and bring it back in your house?

I love being financially independent, and not feeling like I have to squeeze every penny out of every deal. A couple of weeks ago we bought a new car and I just called up our friend across the state line from whom we have purchased several cars. I told him “Ed, I want a blue Ford Bronco Sport and I don’t want a lot of junk on it. “ No negotiation – oh wait we did negotiate a little bit about our trade-in, but I knew it wasn’t worth much. DH thought it was worth more, but he always thinks his stuff is worth more money than it is.

I didn’t negotiate on price and while that might be stupid, it is what it is. Most people gird their loins to go into the car buying ordeal to negotiate and “ get a deal.”

My attention span for buying cars and electronics is only a minute or two. Conversely, I can spend hours,days, and years, deciding on china/pottery patterns and looking at hundreds of options for dinnerware.
We were just worn out after the whole experience. We figured if we were able to recoup it, we would haul it back to our house, it would sit somewhere taking up space until my daughter, who lived 8 hours away, took her time to get there and retrieve it, if she ever did.

As for your car-buying experiences, we are very similar. We tend to spend little time, once we know what we want, on the actual shopping for cars. I bought my Prius after going to a Memorial Day parade to see DH play with his bagpipe band--I was driving home, passed a Toyota dealership, realized that my daughter was going to be taking over the Beetle we shared while she was in college, and made a hard, impulsive left turn into the parking lot. I saw the car, read the features, the salesman approached me as I was writing out a deposit, told him I'd pick it up when we got back from our trip to Scotland the next week, and that was it. That salesman never had an easier sell.

Same thing with the pontoon boat, although DH drove that sale. I was in no mood to buy a boat the month after we moved up here. But he said, let's go look at boats for the fun of it. So we went to the dealership, and the salesman showed us a new boat that had all the features we liked, and before we knew it, DH, with his superb negotiating skills, got the boat for 20% off the asking price. Turns out (we didn't know at the time) they were being bought out by the dealership next door, and so this was their last chance to unload inventory and put the cash in their pocket. Worked for us. As resistant as I was, I now love the boat. It has provided us and the family with many, many hours of fun times and togetherness.