The $25k car is going extinct?

The sweet spot has always been a 1 year old used car with low miles. There’s lots of those for less than or about $25k. Honda, Toyota, and Mazda have models in those ranges that will easily last a decade.

Even better, a 3 year old used car with low miles.

In 2016 I picked up a 2013 320i Sport w/ 22k miles on the clock for $18.5k. The sticker on the car was just over $36k. I did have to fly to a relatively remote town (Ogden Utah) and drive it home to San Diego, so that was an extra $320 for the plane ticket/shuttle/gas and 14 hours out of a saturday.

It was almost out of warranty, so pre-purchase I paid a local shop $110 to do a similar inspection to what BMW does for CPO and it only needed brake pads. Aside from the brake pads and scheduled maintenance, eventually replaced the tires, so about $2000 in maintenance over that period. Sold it for $14.5k w/ 50k on the clock 6 years later.

Could have held onto it much longer but was eager to do the nomad thing as covid was clearing up.

I looked into that when I was buying a car in 2020 and I found the price discount wasnt nearly as big as I thought it was going to be plus the car was out of warranty plus all the parts now had 10k miles of wear on them. A new set of tires is like $1200. I was able to spend a few grand more for a brand new car of the same model.