This is a pretty short post but I wanted to share my experience with my recent FX sale.

I had a few options/ways to sell the car, cars.com, autotrader.com, ebay, and craigslist. I started out with cars.com and a paid ad ($80?) and quickly branched over to craigslist. I then setup an auction on ebay as well. In all honesty, I was surprised about the exposure the vehicle got.

The FX was/is fairly rare, not a WHOLE lot listed on cars.com, ebay, or craigslist at any given time.

My total hit count for almost a month (I just deleted the ad) for the FX on Cars.com was a mere 80 views! Very disappointing. Also, Cars.com did not result in ANY inquiries from buyers (even with the FX listed as OBO). I was underwhelmed with Cars.com exposure even though they post on yahoo autos, etc. Their restrictions on pictures and vehicle details are obnoxious and do not at all help you market your vehicle.

Craigslist: This was just for the sake of doing it, being free and all - I do not believe I received any inquiries from any people who found the FX via craigslist, but I know there were views. The format of my craigslist ad was almost identical to my ebay ad; regular HTML with a bunch of embedded images (30+ vs cars.com measley 14(?)).

Ebay: This one surprised me the most in all honesty - for the 5(!) short days I had it listed on ebay it got 481 views, one "buy it now" offer (which I rejected), had something like 8 "watchers" - and I ended up closing the auction early. I did receive a call from a NY'er who found the car on ebay and was interested in driving down to purchase it for a fairly reasonable price...

Trade: Well, this is the option I chose. Why? Essentially, the tax savings and special APR. In most states, when you trade a vehicle in at a dealer / wholesaler / etc you only pay tax on the difference between the two vehicles. This can be a reasonable bottom-line savings that may not be terribly apparent up front.

In my scenario I would have had to sell the vehicle privately for almost $18,000++ MORE than my trade price in order to come anywhere NEAR a reasonable tax savings.

The other option which I considered but did not delve into was having a wholesaler broker the sale for me. This has the potential benefit of retaining the tax savings, but changes the financing completely so in the end is not worth it.

So, in short: I was going to sell the car privately, negotiated a reasonable trade value with the dealer instead ($1K less than my best private offer), and opted to trade it instead. Just something to think about if and when you have a vehicle you need to sell.