Audi
- Better Man in brief ...
- Keeping an open mind with respect to colors and options may mean a lower price.
- Be patient and wait for incentives and end-of-year bargains.
- Try shopping around far and wide for the best deals in your surrounding area.
"When you love cars and are prone to instant gratification, it’s tough to stick with the same car more than a year."
While penny auction sites insist you can bid on and win any new car you like for the equivalent of a few months’ payments, purchasing through an authorized brick-and-mortar (or click-and-mortar) dealership is a safer and smarter bet. Not that they’ll let you drive off the lot for a thousand bucks. Like it or not, car dealers are for-profit organizations, with overhead and quotas to meet.
That said, you still need to know how to get a discount on a new car. In your father’s day, that meant a marathon of arguing over a couple hundred bucks for pinstripes and rustproofing. The art of the deal has thankfully evolved. Through education, technology and a little self-discipline, you can still negotiate a realistic deal while saving thousands up front and over the life of your loan.
Be flexible but persistent
When you’ve settled on the car you want to buy, it’s good to not only know its features and specs, but also its price points. Most models have multiple trim levels with graduated pricing for standard and optional equipment. It’s tempting to load a car with everything available, but you can literally double the sticker price in the process. So keep an open mind with options and paint. If you can live with a less popular option package and/or color, a dealer might part with it more willingly than the loaded, neutral-toned example more people are buying. As long as you know when to draw the line and avoid being steered into a "deal" that’s actually more expensive, you can still get the car you want without overspending on stuff you don’t need.
Factor your trade-in or -out
Depending on what you’re ditching and what you’re buying, trading in may or may not work in your favor. Be prepared to go either way. See what cars like your old one are fetching in the local classifieds (or the classifieds local to your dealer if substantial distance is involved). While you’re at it, have your potential salesperson give you a ballpark trade-in quote. If you have a high-demand sports car and suddenly learn you’ll need something modest with room for a baby, an infant seat and the half ton of requisite paraphernalia, you could be in a very favorable position. If your outgoing ride is more environmentally hazardous than Charlie Sheen, chances are you’ll come out better selling it on your own or donating it to charity and cashing in at tax time.
Be patient
When you love cars and are prone to instant gratification, it’s tough to stick with the same car more than a year. We get that, because we’ve been there. But we also hate wasting big bucks on an impulse purchase instead of waiting a few months to get a generous discount on a new car. In general, it’s wise to buy during early or late months of the year, when most folks’ monetary focus is elsewhere despite the traditionally great car deals that can be had. Some of those incentives, like rebates, sales events and low-rate financing, are now appearing in the middle months, so don’t let your awareness down the rest of the year.
While you’re at it, drop by the dealer and see your would-be salesperson periodically to stay on his radar, showing you’re serious about a new car, but not desperate. Just don’t wait too long, like until your old car dies and you absolutely need a new car immediately.
Your resolve could have you inhaling New Car Smell in no time."
How new does it have to be?
Be honest with yourself, and decide if you really must take delivery of an absolutely new car fresh off the truck. If you can live with a few numbers on the odometer, you can save big numbers on the bottom line while still being the first guy to register it. To get a discount on a new car this way, look at dealer demos or unsold cars from the last model year. It’s even more to your advantage when a model is redesigned. That’s when dealers become especially eager to clear any remaining inventory they have before the next-generation models arrive.
Get a referral
For all the online reviews of any given dealer, you still can’t drop a username and expect to get a discount on a new car (“Um, bigdaddy69 told me to see you about a deal on a minivan…”). Instead, this is one time when old-school tactics still have relevance today. For this, you’ll need a longtime customer referring you directly to his longtime salesperson. Even if it means prolonged digression into grandkids, sports and weather amid a commingled fog of Brut and English Leather in a too-small office with no ventilation, hang in there. Your resolve could have you inhaling New Car Smell in no time.
Shop around... really around
There’s a lot to be said for keeping your dollars local to your own community, but we caution against doing that at all costs without at least considering alternatives. We are talking about one of the largest transactions you make, after all. So by all means, see what a smaller dealer is willing to do for your business; just don’t stop there. Get quotes from competing dealers around the area and region. Jump online and browse high-volume dealers, even if they’re out of state. Many can and do ship cars on a regular basis while still offering substantial discounts. Sites like AutoTrader, Vehix or even eBay and Craigslist let you compare multiple dealer inventories at a time.
What’s it going to take to get you in this car today?
The safest and most cost-effective way to get a new car is through an authorized and licensed dealer. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re stuck paying sticker price, nor does it mean you have to roll up your sleeves and go into extended haggling. Knowing how to get a discount on a new car is as much about education as it is mediation.
![midlife crisis purchases 630x1668 10 purchases that may indicate a midlife crisis [INFOGRAPHIC]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vPxa_bckFpnsxq8dCr4iLP27B4fXjOF9iiF2R5kXSgqEaTHSL3v58JjWuCqYaHdYKhtoujDZCMdB2lGRfYMcwiAxi1WxlAxnYQ_h1sqtvVsC0DUmIo6n8OfLxdtRofb2R38p5pm4lteOAs9-xJDJzIJA=s0-d "10 purchases that may indicate a midlife crisis [INFOGRAPHIC]")
You get very few rights, by default, when it comes to debit cards. Most of the "rights" you have come in the form of incentives from your bank. Banks will often offer fraud protection packages with their accounts and cards, so be sure to call your bank and find out what rights they're offering for your specific type of account. Generally these rights are pretty decent with major banks. What you need to be more concerned with are the ways they'll charge you fees for minor mistakes on your part. Overdraft feeds are now much more limited, cutting out a huge source of revenue for banks. Additionally, interchange rates are now being capped as of July 1st, 2011, meaning banks can only make so much money in merchant feeds every time you swipe your card. The more restrictions imposed on the banks means the more creative ways they need to find to start charging fees. While nothing is in place just yet, the 
Banks may also do away with debit card rewards programs, so you may want to consider cashing in your rewards points sooner than later. Bank of America, for example, 
Debit cards are not credit cards, even though they operate in very similar ways, but sometimes it can be easy to see them as interchangeable tools. A debit card is really just a quicker means of writing a check. When you write a check, the funds are withdrawn from your account as soon as the check is cashed. The same goes for a debit card, only this happens much faster and is sometimes instantaneous. Anyone who's used a debit card is probably well aware of this, but it's not necessarily what we're aware of when we're actually using the card. It's so important to remember that using a debit card means your money is now gone. There isn't much wiggle room for error. If you pump too much gas and you cause an overdraft of your account—which is still a legal overdraft because of how gas stations charge your card—you're stuck with it. Even with new consumer protection laws preventing banks from allowing us to charge more on our debit cards than our balance can cover, there are still many ways overdrafts can happen.
Going back to the example of purchasing gas for your car, let's break down how this charge works and why you can receive an overdraft. If you pay at the pump, your card is initially charged $1 to ensure it will be approved after you finish pumping gas. This is because the gas station doesn't know the size of your tank, how much gas you're going to put in it, and, therefore, what the total cost of gas will be. Say you want to put $30 of gas in your car because that's all you've got in your bank account and you accidentally go over. Your account will overdraft because your bank has guaranteed the charge to the gas station, just like it would with a check. Because the amount is unknown, those overdrafts are still allowed. Your bank can't deny an amount it's unaware of, but it can honor the charge and assess a fee if you can't cover it. Any situation like this, where the final amount is unknown, will still cause overdrafts. There is nothing protecting you, and so you need to protect yourself. The easiest way is to simply pay up front so the charge will be denied if you can't cover it and so you won't be able to go over the pre-paid amount even if you try. While in an ideal situation you'd keep enough money in your account to avoid overdrafts entirely, you can always forget and always make a mistake so it's best to be careful in this situation.
Another common way of over-drafting your account is when certain kinds of other charges don't show up immediately and you forget about them. Let's say you do not have a credit card that you can use to pay your bills and you only have your checking account and the debit card associated with that account. If you pay your bills using automatic withdrawal (ACH electronic funds transfer), these charges are not protected from overdrafts. Whenever you can, pay your bills with your debit card instead of using automatic withdrawal. This will shift your worst-case scenario from ending up with overdraft charges to simply failing to pay your bill on time. Generally, if a bill is not paid on time, the late fee is considerably less than the overdraft fee and you may not even have to pay that late fee if you can manage to pay your bill within the next few days. You want to avoid automatic withdrawal whenever possible for this reason. Try to reserve wire transfers for money going into your account (e.g., direct deposit for your paycheck).
There are many ways you can become a victim of debit card fraud, but it's a lot easier online. While it helps to 
When you're out making purchases in the real world, there are still a number of risks. For example, many businesses—particularly restaurants—still print credit and debit card receipts with your entire number on them. This is particularly bad because your number is exposed to anyone who sees that receipt. Check your receipts when you make purchases to ensure the full number is not included. If it is, use the pen you're signing with to black out all but the first or last four numbers of your card.
If a fraudulent charge of any kind may have been made to your debit card, you're generally pretty well protected. While banks only have to cover resulting damages past $500 on your credit card, many offer better protection ($50, and sometimes less) as an incentive. Be sure to check with your bank to know how protected you really are in the event someone steals and uses your debit card. If debit card fraud could cost you quite a bit, it may be time to find a new bank.
