
Founder of MetaFilter and friend of Lifehacker Matt Haughey writes in to share how a little research and his cellphone earned him an extra $1,000 when he recently traded in his old car.

If you're in the market for a new car and planning to trade in your older car, it helps to not only read up on previous Lifehacker car-buying tips, but to also equip yourself with some on-site knowledge. Kelly Blue Book is the gold standard for assessing car values, and they offer a handy mobile webapp at i.kbb.com (mobile phones should auto-redirect).


When a car dealership offers you a trade-in price, you can easily compare and even show the dealer what the Fair/Good/Excellent offers are (under the SELL tab, see screenshot attached, the lower three sets of text ). If their offer is below even the lowest range (which it most often is), you have a bargaining chip for negotiating a higher, more fair price for your used car trade-in.

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I used this just yesterday while negotiating at a dealership when they offered me $600 below the lowest Fair trade-in price. The dealership gave me a lowball offer (I already looked up trade-in values the night before), so I pulled up Kelly Blue Book on my iPhone, selected my options, and entered in my mileage. They brought the offer up $1k after seeing their offer was over $600 below the lowest possible offer on KBB for the same car ("with significant defects").