Finding the perfect replacement for a beloved Ford Fiesta

Each option presented a killer deal. The first would be to pay the balloon payment at the end of just under £7500 for a car worth almost double that. The second would be to move it on before the imminent service and first MOT were due to avoid those costs and release the cash in it to buy something else. Given the former option would involve more money through a private loan, and we frankly still don’t need a car that expensive to do what we’d require of it, the second option seemed the no-brainer. 

With another £1500 or so of finance still due on top of the balloon payment, that gave us a working budget of £5500-£6000, which in my head I equated to ‘free’ money, given that it was money tied up in the car and the finance agreement. Equity release, if you will.

Cue about three days on Auto Trader looking at every manner of city car you can imagine (via a brief distraction of an early Mk5 Volkswagen Golf GTI). A city car was the obvious answer, given the limited mileage and firm runaround status the car would have in our household and to truly make sure this was a pragmatic financial decision that baked in lower costs.

We thought we’d settled on a Vauxhall Adam as I was always quite fond of them when I had one as a long-term test car, but the ones we saw locally looked tatty. Then a light bulb from the least obvious of places: I walk the dog each day past a Renault Twingo and have always liked the styling of them, and sure enough we found a good-looking one on Auto Trader at a dealer in Walton-on-Thames. It’s funny how different your buying criteria becomes for a used car versus new. 

Dealer Stuart from Surrey Automotive was friendly, accommodating and responsive when I contacted him on a Sunday evening, which instantly made me feel good about the car. It was a 65-plate in Dynamique trim, with low miles and a clean MOT history. We arranged a test drive the next day, and put the deposit down within the hour. Forty-eight hours later and it had been delivered to our drive, the Fiesta having been sold back to the dealer we bought it from. In cash terms, after the finance had been settled, and the Twingo had been purchased: it cost us about £450. And no more monthly payments.

We’d actually bought the Fiesta during Covid, an excellent experience through the good folk at Think Ford Wokingham, since rebranded as Group 1. We’d caught the end of the ‘old world’ of new car deals: no deposit, 0% finance, dealer deposit contribution. If we’d have known how few miles it’d have gone on to do, we probably wouldn’t have done it in the first place, but c’est la vie.

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And if Ford had known how much they’d have made out of the deal in the end, they probably wouldn’t have sold it… I worked out our costs to have been just £92 a month in running it once we got the cash back at the end, versus a monthly payment around three times that. It’s been one hell of a good deal, to buy, run and then sell.