Is it possible to buy your way to a free car?

I had this discussion recently with another GRMer and would like the thoughts of the Grassroots forum as a whole.

My question is this: using the Challenge mentality, would it be possible to buy and sell cars/parts well enough that, by balance sheet, you could end up with a running/driving car with a budget of zero? I realize there are degrees of running/driving and I don't expect to end up with a track monster for free. But, assuming the answer is, as always, a Miata, I want to buy and sell to the extent that I end up with a Miata to drive around with $0 investment.

Possible? If so, suggestions?

It's challenging to find buyers for every last odd and end, but I think it's possible, yes.

Yes, but by the time you are done it might look like this.

It depends what you want in the end. I have seen Challenge cars that were actually really close to zero. I have wheel and dealed to make a $500.00 car more than pay for itself and sold it for $4500.00.

Short answer yes, but you need resources, time and patience.

BTW my current project is actually at -$75.86 after a set of 275/40r17s, a set of low mileage coil overs and the car itself.

I'm thinking my chumpcar may end up close to 0, at least less the cage. We could probably sell it for more than the total investment by the time we're done, assuming we don't ball it up. Though honestly, I truly believe it would work with time. Cars are usually worth FAR more in parts than as one vehicle.

sure, that's how I did it last fall.

I bought a running red 93 for $600 that had a oxydized paint, dented body, ripped driver seat and ripped top (it also had a bent front control that I repalced with one I already had).

I then bought a $400 non-running red 90 but had a great body and top. Swapped the top, one fender, seat, hood, deck lid and one door (also various little interior and underhood nuggets). Sold the 90 for $1000 to a guy who had an engine ready to drop in it. total cost = $0.

Absolutely possible. Like John Brown said You need resources, time, and patience. Buy other cars to part out for profit while keeping parts you want etc. It's a lot of work but I've done it several times.

1990 turbo grand prix with bad transmission - $900

1990 turbo grand prix basketcase with good trans $600

sell basketcase engine $750

sell hood $100

sell fender $20

sell front bumper $100

sell interior $100

sell taillights $50

sell wheels $100

sell axles $50

sell HUD $25

sell hood louvers $75

scrap shell $200

equals one badass 5 speed swapped turbo grand prix with custom tune, new spec clutch, bigger turbo, upgraded suspension, poly everywhere for negative dollars. i enjoyed it for a couple months then sold it for nice profit.

My first car was a '59 Rambler that I paid $100 for. 2 weeks later, a girl in a new '70 Honda pulled in front of me, and I totaled her car out. I fixed my built-like-a-tank Rambler for about $100. Her insurance paid me $300, which paid for the car, the repairs, and I had enough left over for a new battery and seat covers, with money left over.

Then, after a stint with a '71 Pinto, I got a '74 124 Spider for $3400. Drove it a few years, totaled it, and the insurance paid $3200. Went and bought a new Corolla for $2800, which means I drove it for 3 years and made $200.

Yes, it can be done!

mndsm wrote: I'm thinking my chumpcar may end up close to 0, at least less the cage. We could probably sell it for more than the total investment by the time we're done, assuming we don't ball it up. Though honestly, I truly believe it would work with time. Cars are usually worth FAR more in parts than as one vehicle.

Yeah, it would work with time, but 'how much time' would be the question. One of my former jobs, less fortuitous than this, was in a truck salvage yard, and we sold EVERYTHING, right down to the frames and beat up wheels. The only thing left in the yard would be the oil stains on the ground. BUT, some of those trucks had been in the yard since the mid-50's. About 1972-ish, the owner went on a scrap selling spree that netted enough to take the whole shop (about 15 people...it varied) to dinner at a Chinese restaurant. We cleaned out enough of the yard that he built a gearbox/rearend shop, and we went into the rebuilding business as well as selling used stuff. The rebuild business turned out to be a good one, and we eventually went more for that than selling used. The used trucks in the yard became fodder for yet another portion of the business: stretching frames and adding tag axles. We made the tags, springs and mounts in the shop, used the 'used' frames for the stretching, and the 'used' portions of the business became more of an afterthought than a main focus.

And we kept the 'scrap drive' alive: it became an annual event for the shop to "go to Wong's". The thing is, SOME of those trucks, took years to completely 'amortize', and then it was because scrap prices were good.

That same sort of thinking could be used for a Challenge car, but just how understanding IS your better-half, anyway???

insurance counts?

i paid $1800 to my uncle for 1998 S10. i bought it for my dad because he was giving me his car and he asked in return a nice small truck for driving to the rivers to kayak.

he drove it for a month then hit deer on turnpike. totalled truck, insurance paid out $5200 and let him keep the truck. we fixed it for about $650 in parts including replacing all the brake lines while it was apart. so the truck is running around -$2750 right now.

If I had to guess, I'd say the judges would call the original purchase price a 'sweetheart deal' and disallow it as a strting place. What say ye, judges?

$3500 to insurance salvage for a quad cab Dakota, $2900 for repair, sold $9600. $700, again insurance salvage, for an 04 Neon, $600 repair plus some stuff I had sitting around, $4900. 2000 4x4 Silverado, needs lights and grille, and a bit of box repair- $1832. All in, I will be around $4000 on this one, and I'm keeping it, for a while at least. I'll have the newer truck I want, plus a couple grand in the race budget.

Now, having said that, I can do all the work other than good quality paint myself, and I got a guy for the paint. It takes some skills, and some contacts, plus a dose of seed money to do it.

i'veh ad cars that paid me to drive them.. i once bought a 79 Mustang for $250. drove it for a couple of months, sold it for $400. bought it back a few months later for $300. sold it again- to the same guy- a couple of months after that for $400. bought it back a few months later for $300. got $500 for it when i traded it in for a nice used 93 Lumina.

yes but it would be a pain, you might have heard of this guy who traded his way up from a paper clip and ended up with a house. http://www.oneredpaperclip.com/

Bought the dog ugly 91 Miata for $500.... Sold the hardtop for $900.

Where would that put my budget?

Bruce

Challenge rules only allow you to recoup half your purchase price into the budget. But if we're talking about real life, it is possible to break even or turn a profit.

Last fall I stole... I mean, bought a 94 Saturn SW2 5-speed for $400. I put in rear struts, rear brakes, and drove it through the winter, keeping the Miata off the road. Cheaper than a hardtop! This spring, when I got my Sentra SE-R, I sold the SW2 for $800. I pretty much broke even on the Saturn, and the sale went a long way toward covering the purchase and rehab of the SE-R, which I find much more enjoyable.

Even longer ago, I was given - free - my first motorcycle, an 82 Suzuki GS650L. It was my friend's bike. Sat in his yard, unused, for 3 years, and then he was starting a family, etc. I put some money into getting it running again, and put my first several hundred miles of riding on it - without dumping it, amazingly. A small oil leak got bigger and bigger. Years later, I figured out that it wasn't engine oil, but gear oil where the driveshaft attached to the transmission, separate from the engine oil. I tore up so much in there that it was cheaper to buy a $500 GS550E I found. I swapped a few parts over, then parted out the rest of the bike on the GS Resources forum - turning a net profit!!! Even better, one of my buyers used a lot of my parts in a restoration that was eventually featured as the GS Of The Month on the site.

Once I was also given - free - a 91 Civic wagon, FWD, not RT4WD, but everything worked. I don't remember how much money I put into that car, but it was certainly less than the $1000 I sold it to a friend for. I felt bad turning such a profit off him for a while. Then a couple of years later he got $1300 for it as a trade-in. I've never felt guilty since.

So, yeah, a free car or turning a profit is possible, if you're lucky and play your cards right.

Before I started adding turbo bits this past winter, my sawzall miata was free. I bought it for 1k with a greddy turbo kit and sold the kit for 700. I then sold stuff like mirrors headlights interior etc and got it down to free.

White_and_Nerdy wrote: Challenge rules only allow you to recoup half your purchase price into the budget.

Challenge rules only allow you to recoup half of the $2010 total budget, not just half of the purchase price of the vehicle. The "Free Car" is pretty easy (theoretically) with both challenge car and regular cars. Buy less than $1005 worth of challenge car or cars with lots of sell able stuff on them. Sell stuff, combine remaining parts, enjoy free car!

Another interesting example would be a "$0 Challenge Budget" car that is not free out of pocket. One way to do this would be to buy a car with tons of safety gear included that doesn't count against the budget, sell safety gear to zero out budget, and then buy replacement stuff with no hit to the budget.

I think most of my cars have been closer to free. A number of friends (all?) think it's CRAZY that I have/can afford the Corvette (!) that I 'horse traded' up to. Everyone made a big stink about the paperclip boy, but I suspect most of us accomplish the same thing on a smaller scale. In my case, most cars I buy have something time consuming but cheap that needs to be done.
Fix that, and usually the car is worth significantly more than what you have into it (from a $$ standpoint: I don't value my time highly if it's something I'm doing as a hobby). One example is the euro 520i that we picked up for $300. It needed a headgasket (~$250 DIY) and a CLEAN. I've since been offered $2k for it.
The exceptions are the two appliances we now have (TDI Golf, Protege), but the depreciation is offset by the convenience of having cars that I don't need to wrench on to get to work. (and by the fact that we'll own them long enough that it's a relatively small annual expense.)

Nathan

Short answer then is yes. If a Miata is the answer, then RandyS has the plan I need to follow (quoted below). And Patgizz did exactly what I envisioned as well. The basic thought process seems to be 2 cars. One is bad body/good engine and the other is good body/bad engine. Combine the best of both and end up with a running driving car. Perfect. Time to start perusing CL!

RandyS wrote: sure, that's how I did it last fall. I bought a running red 93 for $600 that had a oxydized paint, dented body, ripped driver seat and ripped top (it also had a bent front control that I repalced with one I already had). I then bought a $400 non-running red 90 but had a great body and top. Swapped the top, one fender, seat, hood, deck lid and one door (also various little interior and underhood nuggets). Sold the 90 for $1000 to a guy who had an engine ready to drop in it. total cost = $0.

Only if you count your time as worth nothing.

Then yes, very possible.

In reply to z31maniac:

^^^ What he said............ Do it all the time. The key like several others have said is parts cars, well at the least that is the easiest fastest way.

z31maniac wrote: Only if you count your time as worth nothing. Then yes, very possible.

Not "only if you count your time as worth nothing", but it makes it a lot more likely. I figure I made a little over $90 an hour working on the 520i. Better than I do at work...

Sure, I do this all the time. In fact, I think my car budget is STILL ahead. My $350 Roadmaster was hit by a garbage truck and they wrote me a check for $2800. And I specialize in three-figure cars, so selling them for a profit is not challenging.

The only car I remember selling for less than I paid for it was my POS convertible Sebring. I lost $150 on that car. That's been my biggest loss in about 4 years. Grr.

I'll give you some chains of sales. Sold $650 240SX for $1200, bought $900 P71. Extra $300 bought my second Roadmaster, a blue '93, that I traded for the Chrysler Newport, which I sold for about $700. My $250 Caprice Classic went for $800 to a guy who had an engine for it, $500 of that went to that Sebring (grr!!). Hmm... How far to go back? :) A small portion of my MR2 proceeds bought a '91 Civic hatch, which became a ZC-swapped CRX, which became a 302 5spd F150, which became an '86 GTV6, which became an '86 745ti, all zero-dollar even trades.

I haven't added to my car slush fund in years. Yep. It's possible!