Guest Author - Robin Segal

You often hear that buying a car at the end of the month is a good idea. Is this true, and if so, why?

Yes, buying at the end of the month is a good idea, but it's not that simple. End of month is a great time to BUY your new car, but it is NOT the best time to make your first dealership visit. Salesmen do try harder to make sales at the end of the month, which is about the last five days of the calendar month.

In addition to the end of the month, there are better and worse times of the year to buy. Best time of the year to buy is the end of December, in most dealerships. Dealerships try to make specific quotas for end of month AND end of calendar year, and it is not a popular time to buy, so sales can slump seriously and they will try harder to make a sale, which means a better bargain. If you shy away from buying in the winter because of bad weather, think again: bad weather is when you WANT to be in the car, testing it’s foul weather capabilities.

Other good times of year to buy are end of August and end of September because the old models are taking up space on the dealership property, and they want to make room for the new models to come in. If your heart is not set on a brand new model, this is an excellent time to buy a perfectly good new car that happens to have been manufactured a few months earlier.

There is a very important BUT to this end of month advice: Do NOT make your very first visit to the dealership at the end of the month. Go to the dealership at the beginning or middle of the month, test drive the cars, get some info, then go home and give yourself two to three weeks to get the best financing. THEN go back at month's end armed with full information and a buying plan. Give yourself a day or two extra in case the first dealership doesn't work out and you need to go to another one. This is a big purchase, don't try to do it all in an afternoon!