I see you obviously did not carefully read my post or you would have seen that I said the following:
"...And with a $3K trade in allowance for your used van, you ended up at the same place as if you had sold it for $1K, then beaten the price on the new vehicle down another $2K. Your dealer really ended up doing you a favor in this case since now you don't have to dispose of the used van..."
Dealers aren't stupid, they do these deals all day long. They know that just about everyone walking through the door that has a trade in is going to try to phyche them out by not asking for trade in credit until they have a final price in hand. So they take the safe road and just assume that a trade in is going to be presented at the last minute, and they make it work to their advantage by leaving some fat in the price. Then when the trade in is presented they can afford to give a rediculously inflated price for it so that the buyer figures I've gotta buy my new car here because nobody else is going to give me this much trade in credit for my old piece of crap. Ultimately it works out fair for all concerned because the extra the buyer thinks he gets for his POS he pays for in the new car price, so the buyer really ends up getting the true value for his old POS, and the buyer also ends up paying a fair price for his new vehicle. But the way they do it, the buyer has a much more warm fuzzy feeling about the dealership, rather than thinking they are a heartless bunch of cruel bastards. The fact that your sitting here defending the price you got as a great deal is perfect proof that the dealer has set the sale up properly to turn you in to another buyer that's going to tell all his friends about the great deal he got, excellent advertising value there.
Nowhere did I say that you got "taken advantage of" in fact to the contrary, the dealer played fair with you. In short, since you elected not to put money into repairing your van then selling it through private sale, you got a fair deal. You did not get an earth-shattering fantastic amazing deal, you got a fair one. Sadly, in US society today, people seem to feel as though they are cheated if they just get fair deals, so much effort is put into making the typical consumer think they are getting an amazing deal for a typical sale. Witness me having the teremity to actually infer that you didn't get the most fantastic deal on the planet, so your knee-jerk reaction is that I'm saying that you were taken advantage of.
Ted