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Who has plans for 2019 to budget a little better, spend a little less — butttt also buy a new car or are just in need of one and know it’s coming? Right here, my hand is definitely up. Not so much because well, I want to – honestly, I love my current car, but because well, it’s gonna be necessary with a growing family. 😉 WHICH THAT PART I’M STOKED ABOUT. Marcus and I love buying Certified Pre-Owned, you can get a car on a budget, but also get a relatively new car (if that’s what you’re looking for) and a nice one at that.

Now, I’m not going to lie, car buying (used to be) my least favorite thing. You know what I’m saying though, the games, the waiting around at the dealership for hours, looking at a million cars, yata, yata, ya. HOWEVER, let me stop myself there because we actually bought Marcus a new car last year because his (very old) car (hahah) finally starting giving out in a lot of places and it was time AND we figured out something that made the process SO MUCH EASIER. So I thought – I need to scream this from the rooftop for all of you.

I’m sure you’ve heard of Autotrader, Guys, it was game changing when we used it for M’s car and well, we 100% plan to use it for our next car. If you go their site, here, one there’s a whole list of questions answered about certified pre-owned vehicles, but the biggest thing to take away (at least for us), is you can get a pretty close to new car, for a fraction of the price, but with the guarantees and warranties behind it. So if you actually hit that page I linked earlier on Autotrader, then scroll down a little bit you’ll see a section on the right hand side that let’s you choose what you’re looking for by brand and car style. You can also search in their “cars for sale” section, here, and just check the certified option. Which I prefer searching this way. This is exactly how we found Marcus’ truck, at the price we wanted and with the certified pre-owned label (which again was REALLY important) to us.

The nice thing about Autotrader too, is that they have everything from Honda Accords to Porche Cayennes – so you’re hitting everything in between as well and are most likely to find the car you’re looking for! I feel like used cars sometimes come with a negative stigma, but when you do it the certified pre-owned way, like I said earlier, you’re backed with that manufacturer warranty and they actually have to undergo a series of testing in the first place to even be sold with the “CPO” label.

SOOO you’re welcome, just somethings we learned last year that I thought y’all could use too for future buying experiences. 😉 Seriously it was a game changer to find it online, go right in, test drive it and get the deal done. We were in and out in less than an hour which is basically unheard of, just because we had done a lot of the research before online.

Stay tuned because I’m excited to share more tips with y’all from Autotrader the coming months!

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