When my husband and I went car shopping, it wasn’t because we one day woke up and decided, “Hey, let’s go get a new car!” We went car shopping because we had to. A week before, I had gotten into a car accident. While I was the one that plowed my vehicle into the other person’s car, the accident wasn’t my fault. The other driver turned in front of me on a 45mph road, and worse yet, turned VERY. SLOWLY. I slammed on the brakes, but when you’re going 50mph and a car turns VERY. SLOWLY. in front of you, you would be an idiot to not expect this to happen:

So it happened, I wasn’t hurt, she wasn’t hurt, I wasn’t at fault, she was. Both vehicles were totaled. Her insurance company cut us a check for the value of our car, so we took that almost $5000 check and went car shopping. We didn’t have a lot of time to spend looking around, because our car rental, which was over $100/day, was only being covered for another day or two. We looked over a used toyota and tried out a Chevy Impala, but decided to look for something a little nicer, since we would be paying out the ass either way. So we settled on a 2005 Hyundai Sonata that had been a rental vehicle, and had less than 9000 miles on it. Thankfully, we chose a great car, and we’ve now had it for almost three years, with absolutely no problems.

It’s not always bad to buy used. Many times you can find nearly new cars — such as ours! — that have their prices slashed significantly simply because they were driven off the lot, or used for a few months. But shopping for a used car can be a daunting task, since you may not always know what you’re getting into. For this reason I highly recommend going to a very reputable dealer of used cars, and/or checking out buyyourcar.co.uk. The buyyourcar.co.uk website is free to use, and you can search for used cars by make, model, color, price range, location and more! One really great feature is you can choose to search for vehicles that are sold privately, by a dealership, or both!

Related posts:

1. Mommy days
2. I want one.
3. So it’s summer
4. If you’re cheap and you know it clap your hands
5. 14 days post-op