If you don't need a large car, I would suggest a 2-5 year old Honda Civic or Toyota Corolla. If you need a bigger car, the Accord or the Camry are both good, if a little more expensive than their smaller brethren.
A Civic/Accord/Camry/Corolla will last you years and years and years if you look after it (my 1993 Camry has 220k miles on it)- they should keep running reliably long past when you've paid it off.
If you want to afford something in the 25k range, you can get a new Prius or Civic hybrid for about that- the Prius is bigger than it looks (can hold 3 adults+ weekend luggage for all 3, and an electric scooter), and both are quite good on gas.
25k for something with over 100k miles on it doesn't sound like that good of a deal...
Edited to add: It can be hard to get financing for a car over a certain age or high miles. We got a 2001 Yukon XL a few months ago (to pull the trailer), and it had 108k miles on it. It was only $11800, but we had a hard time getting financing. My bank couldn't do it at all, because of the age/mileage, and some of the other places we checked could do it, but at a much higher interest rate than you'd pay on a younger vehicle. Because we were running out of time, we got it with dealer financing (11% interest, not great), and we're going to refinance it to USAA in the near future (let the tax refund credit card paydown hit our credit reports first, so we can get an even better rate). We could have gotten a younger vehicle for a 5-7% rate, but we didn't want to spend 30 grand on the truck...
-MsMS
Message Edited by MsMS on
05-01-2008 11:42 AM
