Recommendations for car buying service - like Washington Consumers Checkbook, etc

[Anonymous]

Am in market for a new vehicle. Most likely either a Honda or Subaru. Does anyone have any experience they care to share with a car buying service such as Washington Consumers Checkbook, Consumers Reports, etc. I am not a member of USAA if that matters.

[Anonymous]

Do you have a Costco membership? My sister bought her car that way and it went pretty smoothly.

[Anonymous]

I'm about to buy a new Honda and am going to take a look at the Costco service as PP mentioned. TrueCar also gives you a guaranteed price. However, I came across a site called Fighting Chance. It is $40 and supposedly gives you all the tools and scripts and info to get the best price over email. The site is very 1998 with an insane amount of text, but I've read several good reviews and no bad ones. The only bad things that came up when I Googled were people calling it a scam who hadn't used it, just based off the look of the site. You get inventory info, the promos the dealers have to incent them, timing help, etc for the exact model you are looking at. I figure on a $30k+ purchase, I might as well try it for $40.

[Anonymous]

I've bought Fighting Chance and it is ok. I'm not sure it is worth $40 but it does give you some details about the specific manufacturer (whether they run any promotions or if they just offer financing) and the invoice prices for the specific car. But they tell you in the packet that the information released now on invoice price is irrelevant. Essentially all the manufacturers have changed the game so they overprice even what they sell the dealers and then provide the dealers large cash incentives when they hit certain sales milestones. So in essence the consumer will really never know what the true invoice cost is, so why bother? The tactic suggested for purchasing does work though. You just e-mail a ton of dealers asking for an exact year, model, and trim package and try to get the lowest price. Many of them won't play but if you e-mail 10 you might get half that will. Then out of those half you just start working the price down (again negotiating on the same Honda Accord EX or whatever) and eventually you will (or at least I did) get the price circa $6k down from the "invoice" price. So to me it was a good deal but a huge hassle and it also took me about 5 months to get off all the call/e-mail lists for the dealers I didn't buy from.

[Anonymous]

Costco's car buying program is amazing. My family had used it three times. Unbeatable price and great service.

[Anonymous]

If you are going to spend $40 on Fighting Chance, why not just put that towards the $55 Costco membership and get more for your money?

[Anonymous]

Used car - GO with carvana