Selling — Blog — Healy Chen

It is done

It took almost seven weeks, but our family’s 2018 Hyundai Tucson - which was a lease - is finally sold off. Made a decent bit of profit too, which is nice. The car market is indeed super crazy right now: the absolute worst time to buy a car, but the best time to have a car to sell. The local CarMax gave us $25,000 for the three-year old Tucson that had an MSRP in the $28,000s. The lease buyout was only $16,500, including tax. Do the math!

It had to be said though our Tucson has relatively low mileage (~18,200) and is practically pristine. Your mileage (pun intended) will vary. Don’t look to get around the same money if your Tucson had significantly more miles.

The $8,500 in profit isn’t without some excruciating waiting and patience. Due to the aforementioned crazy car market, leasing companies have stopped the practice of lease buyouts by a third party. No longer can you take your lease vehicle to CarMax (and the like) and have them cut you a check for the difference in present value and the payoff price. The contract buyout price the leasing companies has is with you; they are not legally obligated to sell to third party for that same price.

And at present time, the lease companies aren’t willing to sell at all. They want to impel the customer to return the car to the brand’s dealership. Because there is an absolute dearth of new car inventory due to the chip shortage.

In order to sell the Tucson and get some money back, we had to do it the roundabout way: buy the car outright from Hyundai, then sell the car to CarMax ourselves. Paying for the car was easy - electronic bank transfer - but then we had to wait over two weeks for Hyundai Finance to mail us the title. With the pink slip in hand, there was another problem: CarMax (and the like) only accepts a clean title: the paper cannot include the leasing company as a registered owner, even though they’ve signed it off to you, and there’s a bill of sale.

Getting a clean title required a trip to the local DMV. After paying $25 to transfer the title to my father’s name only, it was then another prolonged wait for the unencumbered title to arrive in the mail.

That took another three weeks, but thankfully the new pink slip came last Friday. We immediately schedule an appointment at CarMax the very next day. Two hours on the premises later, and finally we unburdened ourselves of Tucson. A whole month after my father have already leased another car! Thank god I had the parking space at work to store the Tucson during this time.

So yeah, if you have a car to sell, now is the best time! I just hope you’re not also looking to buy one as well…

Selling my old Macs

In the paradigm to have one laptop to do all my computing needs - I recently purchased a 16-inch MacBook Pro will lots of delicious options - I have to sell my remaining machines to the second-hand market. Not wanting to spend the time nor energy on the likes of Craigslist and eBay just for a slightly higher return on price, I elected to go with third-party resellers that guarantees a price up front. All there is for me to do is box up the computers nicely and drive it to the local Fedex store.

For my old 15-inch MacBook Pro, I went with Apple’s own trade-in program. Customers can either directly apply the credit towards a new purchase, or take an Apple gift card for a future date. I did the latter because at the time I was not yet ready to order this 16-inch MacBook Pro I am currently typing on. It turns out, the Apple trade-in program is handled by a third-party company: Phobio. It does feel a bit bait-and-switch because the the Apple website makes it look like the reputation of Apple is behind the trade-in, but in reality you are to deal with Phobio. Should something go wrong, Apple support isn’t going to do anything - they’ll instead refer you to Phobio.

That’s not exactly confidence inspiring, but I am happy to report I was successful in getting the money for my 15-inch MacBook Pro as promised.

For my circa-2017 27-inch iMac, I went with the company called Cash For Your Mac, after reading solid reviews about the San Diego company on the forums. Like most resellers, they will pay for the shipping, but because it’s a huge iMac, they don’t provide the box. If you need a box, Cash For Your Mac is happy to sell you a bespoke one for $50. I work in IT on a university campus, so lucky enough I was able to grab a spare original iMac box from work. Many rolls of bubble-wrap later, the machine got down to San Diego in two days, and another three days later I received the check in the mail. The transaction is as painless as it gets.

Now that I’ve consolidated my entire digital life onto this 16-inch MacBook Pro, up next is to pursue a solid backup strategy. After all, these mobile machines are relatively easy to lose compared to something stationary like a workstation. I would hate to lose absolutely everything in an instant.