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Warning: I stopped buying $3,000 running cars and now I flip $800 ones that barely start
Everyone on here says buy the best car you can afford, like a $4,500 Corolla with 130k miles that runs and drives, and flip it for a few hundred. I did that for two years out of a lot in Akron and made maybe $250 a car after tags, gas, and fees, mostly because the nice ones already had all the value baked in. Six months ago I flipped my whole approach and started buying the junk nobody bids on, like a 2003 Grand Am I got for $650 because it had a bad fuel pump and the seller just wanted it gone. I put a $90 pump in it in my driveway on a Tuesday, cleaned it up, and sold it 9 days later for $2,200. My average profit now is around $1,100 a car and I spend way less time hunting for clean titles because I'm not competing with 40 other guys for the same nice Civic. Yeah, sometimes I eat it, like the $700 Ranger with a cracked head that I scrapped for $310, but that's one bad one out of about nine. The main thing that changed is I got comfortable with a wrench and stopped treating a non-running car like a curse. So for the folks who swear you need a runner, what's the real reason, is it the risk or is it just not wanting to get dirty?
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felixh4518d ago
I did the same thing about a year back, but with trucks. Bought a 99 F150 that wouldnt crank for $500, turned out to be a $40 starter, sold it for $1800. The guys fighting over the clean stuff are paying full price and then some, so theres nothing left. The fear part is real though, not everyone has a garage or a second car to drive while the project sits. I keep a cheap code reader and a jump box in the truck now and it takes most of the guessing out of it. The dirty part never bothered me, what bothered me was losing money on a car I couldnt fix. Once you learn to walk away from rust and blown motors, the math just works way better on the ugly stuff lol.
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