Use Carmax

There are a few places in American society where we know we will be ripped off: Cell phone contracts, and car dealerships. You'll spend probably 1-5% more through carmax than an alternative, but you won't feel bad about yourself afterwards.

If you need a car to get you back and forth to work everyday, just use Carmax.

The author has evaluated private party sales, auction sites, used car dealerships with stellar ratings, and Carmax competitors like Carvana. Carmax beats them all out in some dimension of utility. better selection, actually up-front pricing, a professional maintenance team. They are an enormous business of which you will just be a tiny portion of.

Most importantly, their sales people seemed to not be incentivized to do anything but actually show you cars. This may seem like the author is a Carmax employee or stockholder. I just wish all the rest of the car buying experiences were as good as carmax.

It takes all day

Plan for at least 4 hours at the Carmax dealership. Do not bring your kids. You can do all the paperwork you want at home, it will still take as much as 4 hours. There is a limited number of people at Carmax who can actually prosecute the paperwork required to transfer ownership. You will be signing about 20 different pages of documents.

Again, this is the best experience you can have. Experiences at typical car dealership when buying a new or used car involve pressure tactics, back room manipulations and last-minute changes to the deal to exploit you. Carmax does not do this.