I am in the process of buying a used car now. Have looked into direct sales from Hertz and Avis. I am looking at a Toyota RAV4 and went and looked at one yesterday. It had one deep scratch on the hood so we passed but overall was a good condition car with 25K. I have 2 more to look at. It might be a bit of leg work, but I feel it these might not be more abused than a lease return car. I am saving close to $2K over dealer pricing.
Right now we have a rental Yaris/iA and it is a pretty decent commuter car. Gets 38 MPG with my wife driving, so you can’t do worse.
I think you might be able to get a decent deal looking into this option.
found a few camry/corollas in the 2011/80k/10k range. good choices if they have been maintained and not beat on. my 2015 civic will be in the 9k range w/45k miles this fall. i dont think we are in the 80-100k range where i can say the cvt trans is ok yet
If you can wait around until the right car comes along, then you might be able to pull this off. If there’s a deadline at which point you need to have the car, it becomes much less likely.
I have bought several cars for much less than $10,000 that have lasted longer than your goal, but they had more than 60,000 miles on them when I got them. I got my MR2 for several thousand under blue book because the seller just wanted it gone. It had 80,000 on the clock. That was something like 17 years ago now and it’s still going. I got my CRX for several thousand below blue book 19 years ago because the seller was a friend who wanted to see it go to a good home. It, too, had around 80,000 on the clock. It now has 200,000 on it, and still looks new (so it definitely went to a good home! )
But these were one-off situations. If I needed a car within a month, I would not expect to get a screaming deal, and therefore some of the things on your list would have to be sacrificed. As others have said, start with mileage because 60k in today’s automotive world is hardly anything. For less than 10 grand, anything under 125,000 would be acceptable mileage.
The internet is your friend , go to cars.com or autotrader.com and look around and see whats available in your area . All have the mileage on them and you can get an idea of what you are looking at and what you might have to spend .
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