How Much Is My Car Worth?

There could be many reasons you may ask yourself, "how much is my car worth?". You may need to sell it because you are buying a new vehicle, or it may need to be replaced because it's getting old, or youmay just want to know how much you can get for it.

Either way, there are multiple ways you can find out how much your car is worth. You can get a good estimate of what you can sell your car for with car price guides and tools you can use on the internet.

Trading In Your Vehicle

If you decide to trade in your vehicle, you may be shocked as to how little they will offer you for your car. At a dealership, they are looking to make a profit off of every single car they buy, and that includes your car that you are willing to trade in. So if you are looking to get the most money for your vehicle, sell is as a private seller and not to a dealership as a trade in.

Looking at this from the standpoint of a dealership wanting to buy your vehicle towards the purchase of a new vehicle, they would look at how much they could get for your car. On average, the dealership could get a little more for your car than you could get by selling it yourself. So there may a chance that you can get a decent enough deal with the dealership to just trade it in and find a new car. The best way to get the most money for your car, is to sell it yourself.

Internet Resources

The easiest way to find out how much your car is worth is to go online. You can get an approximate value for your car using several different websites.

These websites use data that you give them from your vehicle such as the year, make, and model. They will then calculate an average selling price for you car.

Before you go to one of these sites, have the following information ready:

• Year
  
• Make
  
• Model
  
• Trim Package
  
• Engine Size
  
• Options
  
• Mileage
  
• Vehicle Condition
  
• Your Zip Code
  
• Body Style
  

With this information, you can go to any of the following websites to find out how much your car is worth. These websites provide general information, so take account for anything that is wrong with the vehicle that you have not provided to the site. Here are three sites that will give you the information you need:

• Kelley Blue Book (KBB)
  
• NADA Guides (NADA)
  
• Edmunds
  

Kelly Blue Book

Kelly Blue Book will give you three different prices for you vehicle. They use the year, make, model, mileage, etc for the values they give you just like the other two guides will. They will give you a price for each condition that your car is in. If you're selling a vehicle, it will be hard to know what kind of condition your vehicle is in, since your have probably driven the vehicle for a while.

They will give you a price for excellent, fair, and poor conditions. Don't select the poor price because the state of these vehicles and their prices will vary greatly. As a general rule, you want to use the fair option. Kelly Blue Book will give you a decent idea of how much your car is worth, but to get a better idea of the price, you should look at all three options on the Internet.

NADA

NADA will give you a lot of options for choosing a price to sell your car. They also offer other values on things like classic cars, antique cars, old cars, and classic cars.

But it's not only cars that you can get a value for at the NADA web site. You can also get values on boats, RV's, motorcycles, and even manufactured homes.

NADA will also give you three different values for your car like Kelly Blue Book does. The difference with NADA is that they will not give you a private party value for your vehicle. The private party value is what you are trying to estimate so you can then go or call a dealership to compare that private party value, to the trade in value they will give you. You can then make a decision on what way you want to sell your car. Obviously, you want to get the most you can for your car.

Edmunds

The Edmunds website is not only a site to get a price for your car, but you can purchase a car and auto insurance off of their website. You may not need all the services they offer, but it's good to know that they offer the service right there.

Edmunds has something they call "true market value" for their estimations of your vehicle. You start by putting in the year, make and model of your vehicle. Once you go through the whole process of putting all the information that they ask for, they will give an estimated price you could sell your car for.

Edmunds not only uses the condition of your vehicle, they use current market trends, the economy, and inventory levels in your area to estimate your car's worth.

Getting Values From Other Sources

How do you know how much someone is selling your exact make and model for?

You go to websites that sell vehicles online, and look for your vehicle in the listings. This is the most efficient and effective way to get a real value for your car.

A number of websites sell vehicles which you can use to determine the value of your car. Here are just a few of the larger sites that you can take a look at:

• http://www.cars.com/
  
• http://www.autotrader.com/
  
• http://www.carsdirect.com/
  

These sites allow you to search for your year, make, and model of vehicle. Once you find all the cars that match those records, you can then boil it down to the mileage of the vehicles.

If you can find five cars that have about the same mileage as yours, you can get a really good idea of how much you would be able to list your car for.

This is the best way to get a value for your vehicle. Since the market is what sets the prices for goods, this is a must in your search to find out how much your car is worth. Don't use only the three sites above; go to other local sites to see if there are any other cars like yours.

The more prices you can find, the more accurate your price estimate will be.

Final Steps to Getting a Value for Your Car

The last thing you need to do is to average out all the prices you got from the three resources online. You can use an average, or just use the span of prices that were given to you.

The prices may vary significantly so take a third person perspective.

Look at your car and ask yourself, "How much would I pay for this car?"

If you can set a price from these three prices, you are on your way to the final step to knowing how much your car is worth.

Call a few dealerships in your area and find out what they will give you for your vehicle. If the price is higher than what you came up with, then that's good. Go ahead and sell the vehicle to the dealership. In most cases, you will have to wheel and deal with the dealerships to get the price for your trade in. That could be a hard task if you don't personally know someone who works at the dealership.

The whole goal of this exercise is to get the most out of your current vehicle, so that you can get the car you really want and save some money while doing it. Whether your car is a classic car, antique car, RV, or motorcycle, you will be able to go through these steps and find the best price that you can get for your car.

You can find more ideas about how much is my car worth with this article, or you can read how much is my car worth here for another perspective.