So have you seen those commercials for Ebay where they are on the fox hunt, or football field, and the carnival balloon game? The winner just barely outdoes the rest of the participants and ends up dancing the victory dance!
That's me!
Now I've been an ebayer for some years now (1999) but I have never had the feeling of really coming off the winner like I had this last month when I won our F150.
Having been in the market for another vehicle for some months and finding no great deals in our area, I once again thought; why not check on Ebay? I often find that we can get the best deals there. And yet just as often forget to check on Ebay for something we need or want.
Shelly does virtually all the girls school clothes shopping on it and I buy books, computer cables, books, cameras, books, birkenstocks, books, scout uniform, books, guitar, books, guitar lesson books, cd's, books, well anyway's we use it a lot.
So this time I am thinking why not a truck? I found many for sale in the price range we were looking for but most had reserve amounts on them that had not been met. However several auctions had no reserves and one particular outfit National Auto Mart had more that 17oo sales. They had 2 F150's up for auction and I kept track of them for a week. During the last 1/2 hour of each auction the bidding started taking off and the first one went way past what we wanted to pay but still was in the KBB range.
On the 2nd auction Shelly and I did our math, came up with what we would be willing to pay and watched the time wind down. In the last 12 minutes it went from $3200.00 to $3970.00. Excellent KBB value for this truck was 7900.00 and good was 6500.00.
I checked the bids to see who was bidding and saw that one bidder was always one up on the rest.
With 10 seconds to go I was going to place our max bid at 4500. Upon starting to populate the box it pre populated with and old bid with an uneven amount and I thought to myself," that's right, make it an odd number". So I bid $4503.27. Ten seconds later we won the truck with that exact amount. The other bidder having previously placed his max bid at 4500, we would have lost.
I was dancing around the computer! I could just picture the guy banging his head against his monitor! Beat by $3.27!
I flew to Arizona to pick it up last week and I think it is one of my best deals ever from Ebay. Shelly and I both think it is a KBB rating of Excellent and could not be happier with out dealings with National Auto Mart. If you need a vehicle check them out. I highly recommend them. They deal in commercial lease returns.
This is now the second vehicle we have paid cash for and I will never again borrow money for a vehicle. What a great feeling! We are doing our best to live the Dave Ramsey Total Money Makeover!
One of the more memorable moments from this purchase was my mother-in-law telling my wife upon hearing that we had bought a truck on the internet.
"For intelligent people you two sure are dumb."
I think it just must be her generation.
