Summer of Traveling, Buying, Restoring and Flipping Cars

How to buy a used carThis summer I have been super busy. From flipping cars to traveling. Some of the memorable moments were on my Africa Safari trip,  my trip to Connecticut and working on my 1975 International Scout.

I’ve told you guys about a little bit about my trip to Africa, but I still have more to update on that. What an amazing trip that was!! (Will post more on that later.)

As I mentioned in my last post about my trip to Connecticut, I shot a cool new video course we have in the works on How To Buy a Used Car.

(Make sure to sign up for my email updates so I can give you the heads up on new posts and when we launch the video course.)

Back to summer…

I headed back home after about two weeks. I admit, I had fun up in CT with my mom and sister, even though I thought it would be horrible! But I was sooo excited to get home and get back in my garage.

On the vehicle front, I have been working on a few things. As I mentioned before, I had a 1994 Ram 1500 dually. The big, noisy, flat black truck. I ended up trading that truck for a little Toyota Tacoma. The Toyota was in really good shape. It had a much better resale value than the Ram which is why I traded for it. I didn’t have to do a ton of things to get the Toyota saleable. The first thing I did was give it a good cleaning. Then I fixed the air conditioning and lowered the ride height of the truck two inches in the rear to give it a nice stance.

The funny thing about this story was that the guy who traded me the Toyota for the big black dually came back the next day and asked me a really weird favor.

He said he needed to borrow the Toyota and “replay” the trade for his girlfriend. He said she would kill him if she knew he bought a truck without her.

So he came over and picked up the Toyota…at this point I had both titles and the dually, so I wasn’t too worried…and he drove up to the local high school to pick up his girlfriend, brought her back to our house, looked over the dually as though he was looking at it for the first time. Got the girlfriend’s approval and made the deal happen. Again.

This is when I quickly got to work on the Toyota, and sold it within a week.

1975 International Scout

After Toyota was sold, I was on to another really cool new project…

Right before I left for Connecticut, I bought a bright yellow 1975 International Scout. It came on a nice car trailer. I paid $1,500 for the whole thing. The trailer itself is worth at least $1,000, so technically, I paid $500 for the vehicle itself.

It was pretty disassembled when I got it, but I knew I could make some good money on it if I could get it back on the road.

The motor and trans were disconnected and on a stand outside of the truck. The truck was pretty much a rolling chassis.

1965 Mustang

Since I’ve been back from Connecticut, I’ve bought a bunch of stuff for the Scout and it’s getting close to finished. My friend Quyen has come by many times to help me out which has been a lot of fun. It’s been so hot here this summer that we often work at night when it’s cooler.

I hope to have this done soon, so I can sell it and buy more stuff for the Mustang. I not only want my Mustang done, but my mom and dad won’t let me get my license until I finish it. I totally get where they’re coming from, but I reallllllly want my license so it’s frustrating!

Tell me what you think!