4 things to watch when starting a online buisness

Buying Tips

10 Steps To Buying a New Car

Step 6 to 10 :

Step 6: If you are trading in your old car…

If you are trading in your old car to a dealer, you will probably not get as much money toward the price of a new car as you would have if you’d sold it yourself to a private party. However, trading in offers some advantages. You can solve all of your car-buying problems in one visit to the dealer. You can unload a hard-to-sell car without running advertisements and dealing with tire-kicking buyers, or long DMV lines. In some states, you will even pay less sales tax on a deal that involves a trade-in.

Begin the process by looking up your car’s trade-in value on Edmunds.com. The Edmunds.com True Market Value^® (TMV^®) Used Vehicle Appraiser will also give you trade-in values. After you plug in all of the vehicle’s information (mileage, options, condition and colors) you will get a specific trade-in price. This will often be different from the offers you get once you are on the car lot. At a dealership the value assigned to your trade-in varies based on the time of the month, the dealer’s specific inventory and the used car manager’s mood, but at least TMV will give you a rough idea of what your trade-in is worth.

If it’s important to you to get the maximum value for your trade-in, you should visit several dealerships and solicit bids. Tell the salesperson that the sale of a new car will be contingent on the amount he or she will give you for your trade-in. Also, tell them you are visiting several dealerships. With a little legwork, you may be able to boost the price you get for your old car by several hundred dollars or more. Remember, the extra effort you spend in getting competitive bids is far less than what it would take to advertise, show and sell the car yourself.

Step 7: Negotiating for your lowest price

Many buyers like to handle the question of price before they even go to the dealer. Internet salespeople are willing to discuss price over the phone — even by e-mail. The car salesman on the lot will try to get you in his office before he would get down to brass tacks and talk price.

It’s quite possible that, in your calls to various Internet departments, the selling price of the car has already come up. Often Internet salespeople will volunteer the selling price of their car since they know this is the make-or-break factor in most buyers’ decision making process. If the price they’ve quoted is at or below Edmunds.com’s TMV, then you are already in the right range to buy the car. If you want to try to improve the deal, you have a few options.

Everyone has their own idea of what makes a good deal, but most people just want to know they got a fair price. Here, TMV will be your best guide. If you want to try for a rock-bottom price, start by getting bids from three local dealers. Follow this up by taking the lowest price, calling the two other dealerships and saying, “I’ve been offered this car at this price. If you beat it I’ll buy it from you.” They almost certainly will. However, keep in mind that you can’t play this game forever. Eventually, they will give you a take-it-or-leave-it price. .

Also, be warned that if you ask the dealer to cut his profit, he might try to take it back somewhere else. Remember, a good deal isn’t just the lowest selling price. It’s the lowest total out-the-door cost on a car that meets your needs. This means that to get a fair deal you have to be alert throughout the entire purchase process, even after you and the salesman agree on a price.

10 Steps to Buying a New Car

Step 8: Closing the deal

If you feel good about the price you have been quoted, it’s time to take a look at the big picture. Many buyers focus on the cost of the car and ignore the related expenses. Besides the cost, you will have to pay sales tax and various fees which vary from state to state. These expenses can be estimated and totaled with the Edmunds.com calculators.

The simplest way to estimate total cost is to ask the salesperson to fax you a worksheet and invoice before you go to the dealership. This way, you’ll be able to review the figures in a relaxed environment. Compare the numbers from the dealership to those you have calculated and the TMV prices on Edmunds.com.

In some areas of the country, dealers have costs that don’t show up on Edmunds.com invoice prices. This means the Edmunds.com invoice price of the car you are researching might not exactly match the dealer’s invoice. Don’t panic — and don’t begin making accusations. Edmunds.com can’t track all regional fees, such as advertising costs. So, as a rule of thumb, consider the charges on the dealer’s invoice to be nonnegotiable. However, if extra fees are written into the contract (such as “D&H” or “Administrative Costs”) which seem bogus or redundant, ask to have them removed, or say you will take your business to another dealership.

Step 9: Reviewing and signing the paperwork

Once you have a deal, you can ask the Internet manager or car salesman to deliver the car to you at your home or office. This means you will review the contract and sign it in your space, not the dealership’s finance and insurance office (which many buyers find intimidating). Wherever this step takes place, you will be presented with the contract for your new car and a dizzying array of forms to sign. If you are in the F&I office, the finance manager (who is actually an expert salesperson) will try to sell you additional items such as extended service contracts, fabric protection, alarms or a LoJack vehicle locator. In most cases, we recommend turning down these extras — with the possible exception of the extended warranty, which provides peace of mind to some buyers. Additionally, it is worth noting that some states allow up to 60 days after purchase to cancel an extended warranty, but you should check local laws to confirm your options in your area. If the car is delivered to you, the contract is already drawn up, so these extras are not an issue.

If you have already seen a worksheet for the deal you’ve made, the contract should be a formality. Make sure the numbers match the worksheet and no additional charges or fees have been inserted. You will also be asked to sign various forms that register your new car and transfer ownership of your trade-in. Understand what you are signing and what it means. Ask questions if you don’t understand, and don’t ever feel like you have to hurry. Buying a car is a serious commitment and you should understand every document involved. Remember, once you have signed the contract you cannot take the car back.

Step 10: Inspecting and taking possession of your new car

Most dealerships detail the car and provide the first tank of gas for free. You will have one more chance to inspect the car before you take possession of it. Make sure you walk around the car and look for scratches in the paint and wheels or dents and dings on the body. If you are paying for floor mats make sure they are included. If anything is missing, or if any work needs to be done, ask for a “Due Bill” that puts it in writing. You will then be able to come back and get the work done later.

As you drive away inhaling that new-car smell, there is only one more thing to be done: enjoy your new car.

Make moeny from you blog another idea

The wrong way to buy the right funds

By Rick Aristotle Munarriz

It’s settled, then. You’re ready to buy into your next mutual fund. Maybe it’s your first investment. Maybe it’s your hundredth. From the day-trading speculator to the buy-and-hold retiree, lots of stock investors own mutual funds — you’d be surprised at the numbers. I don’t think I’ve ever gone without a mutual fund or two in my portfolio for any significant length of time.

Then again, that’s also the problem. Everyone thinks they’re mutual fund experts. They can pull up historical returns to make sure they’re buying a winner. They can express interest in a particular category and narrow the selection process that way. They can review a portfolio’s holdings to make sure it has the kind of stocks they can get behind as a shareowner. They can even dig into the prospectus to make sure the expense ratio is fair.

If that sounds like an exhaustive process for finding your next fund, boy, have I got some bad news for you — all four of those steps have some serious shortcomings.

It may not seem fair. After all, you’re buying into a fund because you want a professional money manager to make the tough decisions for you, right? What to buy, what to sell, when to buy, when to sell? This doesn’t mean that buying mutual funds will prove to be too much of a hassle, though. It’s easy, really.

Well, it’s easy as long as you don’t take the easy way out. Let’s revisit the problem with the four wrong ways to find the right funds.

Past performance isn’t everything
It’s not an earth-shattering revelation that you can’t simply extrapolate the past few years to arrive at likely future returns. Early into any mutual fund ad or prospectus, you’ll see the boilerplate disclaimer that past performance is no guarantee of future performance. However, investors can get burned if they rely strictly on hot recent returns.

For starters, how long have the portfolio managers been with the fund? If a particular mutual fund has an impressive long-term track record, is the current management team the one that steered the fund to the greatness that attracted you in the first place?

When my second son was born, I decided to open an education IRA in his name with Stein Roe Young Investor. It was a cute concept. The managers would buy kid-friendly companies, and the quarterly reports included kid-targeted content and educational activities. The performance was smoking at first. However, the fund went through several management changes in my son’s first seven years. The fund family was even acquired by a company that now charges stiff annual maintenance fees (relative to the modest initial investment), which used to be nil for Stein Roe.

The collection of great kid-geared stocks? Right now, the fund’s holdings include Apollo Group (Nasdaq: APOL), Bed Bath & Beyond (Nasdaq: BBBY), and VeritasDGC (NYSE: VTS). I have no beef with these companies per se, but when’s the last time you saw a kid enroll in a postsecondary school for adult education after picking out linens but before hopping on a freighter to gauge for seismic activity for singling out ideal oil-drilling spots? There’s no Mattel. Good grief, there isn’t even a Disney.

Logical fund investments like candy juggernaut Hershey (NYSE: HSY) and athletic footwear juggernaut Nike (NYSE: NKE) are too small to make a difference in what I thought I had originally bought into.

Even worse, recent performance has been pathetic. Over the past five years, the fund has returned an annualized gain of only 0.8%, badly anchoring down Young Investor’s lifetime annual return of 6.1%. Perhaps that’s the reason why the fund is in the process of being buried under the rug as Columbia seeks shareholder approval to roll it up into a larger fund.

In other words, a lot is baked into past performance. Just make sure that you’re buying into the same management team and strategy that achieved those returns.

Categories, scattergories?
It’s important to take a fund’s performance data in perspective. You can’t compare an international high-yield fund with a short-term investment-grade vehicle. You’d be wrong to pit a blue-chip value mutual fund against a high-growth micro-cap investment.

However, there are also pitfalls in narrowing your search to a specific category. In 1997, MarsicoGrowth & Income was launched. Tom Marsico was a growth-stock star with Janus when the fund family was at the top of its game in the early 1990s. Like many successful managers, he decided to capitalize on his fame at Janus and IDEX by striking out on his own. Cool. He earned it.

However, growth and income funds tend to invest in dividend-paying companies. Shareowners come to expect a little income along the way. The problem here is that Marsico’s fund has never yielded an investment income distribution. Its holdings include companies that yield far less than the company’s fund expenses, such as clinical lab operator Quest Diagnostics (NYSE: DGX) and chip maker Texas Instruments (NYSE: TXN). Perhaps that’s why the fund was eventually renamed MarsicoGrowth Fund. However, the company’s ticker symbol — MGRIX — still contains the “I” for income, and even though the fund-quote services have moved it to the more appropriate “large-cap growth” category, one has to wonder if investors truly understand the new objective. Until recently, even Morningstar had “income is a secondary consideration” in the fund’s description, perhaps fueling false hope for pocket change beyond its primary growth objective.

Don’t overpay for that doggie in the window
Then you have the problem of relying on a fund’s report to detail its holdings. Here’s where a pesky little practice called “window dressing” comes into play. A fund manager may sell his duds and load up on hot stocks just before the end of a reporting period in a poor attempt to cover up lackluster performance.

Thankfully, most managers don’t resort to such tactics these days. Investors are too smart for that. If they see hot holdings and a cold track record, they will judge a fund based more on its actual returns than its list of current holdings.

The greatest expense
How much is fund ownership costing you? Management fees and other fund operating expenses come into play here, and that information is readily available. Some fund families like Vanguard and TIAA/CREF pride themselves on dirt-cheap expense ratios, but you’ll often find some of the best-performing stock funds to be manager-driven vehicles with reasonable — though certainly not the cheapest — fees.

That’s why one shouldn’t limit a growth fund search to expense ratios. In fact, some funds often absorb a chunk of the management fee — temporarily — in order to attract new investors. So keep your eye on expenses, but do so knowing that there’s often more there than meets the eye.

Four wrongs can make a right
Buying a fund is easy. Choosing the right one doesn’t have to be much harder than that. Just don’t fall into the trap of relying on one particular gauge without understanding its shortcomings.