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Comment by ams6110 | Hacker News Reader

Not at all. You can buy a good, reliable, well maintained car for $3,000. Mileage is less important than maintenance history. The Focus is a particularly good choice IMO. They are reliable, pleasant to drive, and Ford made gazillions of them so you can get them repaired anywhere and parts are cheap.

You can also buy a basket case for $3,000, so you do need to have a bit of an idea of what to look for (or what to avoid).

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I'm going to be replacing a taurus soon. $3k is my budget. I took highschool auto, but would absolutely not feel comfortable buying a used focus.

Where are the resources to learn what I 'need to look out for'?

/r/cars |

/r/justrolledintotheshop

Wasn't there a year recently where reliability skyrocketed? 2004 or something? I thought I heard there is a clear cutoff point where you should not consider buying a car before that date.

Mazda Protege5. Best hatchback of the early 2000s.

...if your looking for something fun, reliable, and manual. Otherwise just get a Camry or a Matrix or something like that.

Please link to this good, reliable, well-maintained car for $3k or under, because (without a family/buddy deal) it does not exist.

It definitely does, you just have to be willing to spend the hours to look for the deal.

FWIW, I bought a 2004 Corolla with 140k miles off Craigslist in a HCOL city for $3,200 back in June. No issues so far.

As bfuller already said, they do exist. I got my 2005 Honda Accord (Manual) on craigslist (2 days of research) for $2900.

It has lasted me 5.5 years now with no maintenance except oil changes.

Possible that you got lucky in a lemon market?

I've noticed manual transmission cars are usually discounted relative to autos.

Look for any 1999+ Toyota Carolla/Prism with under 200k. Many camary of that era are bulletproof. Civics all got bought up by ricers, but '3k civic' is literally a meme for being so common.

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