Latest / Marci talks money (and life) / How to Buy a Car Without Getting Taken for a Ride | Dominic Genova
Transcript
- Marci (00:15) Hello, I am MoneyMarci. Welcome. I'm thrilled to welcome today's guest, Dom Genova. Dom is the founder of Genesee Valley Motors, one of New York's top dealerships and author of 'Don't Get Taken for a Ride'. He built his business by eliminating commissions and hidden fees, a no nonsense approach to car buying that resonates with anyone who's ever felt burned by the car industry. He rejected the usual dealership playbook and he brings a practical operator's perspective on trust, transparency, and how consumers can protect themselves when making major purchases. Welcome, Dom. Dominic Genova (00:53) Why thank you very much. My objective here is to help educate some people on some of the stuff that you don't know when you're buying a car. How you introduced me is very accurate, except I sold my dealerships in 2020, a week before the COVID shutdown, and now I'm going out and giving lectures and talks, and I have a book about how to buy a car without getting taken for a ride. So I worked for the company for Chrysler for 17 years, calling on dealers and advising them on how to do their operations. And then I had my own dealership for 26 years because I couldn't stand working for the bureaucracy of Chrysler anymore. We had a competitive advantage of being transparent and supportive of our customers, and so now I'm going around and trying to spread the same gospel to people so we can save a couple of people from getting what we call snookered when they buy a deal. Because I know things you don't know. Marci (01:47) So how did you get here? Was an auto dealership and then a book always your plan? Dominic Genova (01:51) Yeah. The story, to give it in a short form is I'm working for Chrysler. I worked there for seventeen years in ninety-four, making like a hundred grand, which is really good money for ninety four. I have a company car, all the gas I can use, I don't have to pay insurance, I have a five weeks vacation, we have all the health care we want, and when you get into your late thirties in one of these big companies you realize where you're gonna go. You know, either I'm gonna get transferred or I'm gonna work in a cubicle and our girls were one and four at the time and my yeah, we just rejected the lifestyle. So we started in this small dealership in upstate New York. The building had no power or water, and we were going to cross the street to the Ford dealership to go to the bathroom, believe it or not. And we had like six people, eight people working for us. And we never wanted to be a big dealer. But I always thought working for Chrysler and seeing these dealers that transparency could be a competitive advantage because all dealers buy their cars for the same price from the factory. So you either got to do one or two things to make a deal. You have to sell it at a great price and compete against the other dealers, or you have to do something kind of well, I won't say deceptive, but you have to do something to draw people into the dealership and then use strategy and tactics which people hate. And we used our culture as a competitive advantage. And it worked. When we sold the dealerships in 2020, I had 87 people working for me and we were selling 80 million dollars worth of stuff a year from starting back in 94. The girls were one and four. We sold everything but the furniture and the kids. Marci (03:19) Probably a good idea not to sell the kids. Dominic Genova (03:22) Yeah, I have two girls. I love them dearly. Well I tell ya they are, they're wonderfully self assured, snarky humored women. I just love dearly. I can tell you some stories. Marci (03:33) And I wanna stick with the financial literacy and I want your daughters to talk to you after this broadcast, so probably Dominic Genova (03:39) Ha ha ha. Marci (03:40) safer that way. So what kind of things did your auto dealership do that was different? Dominic Genova (03:46) Let me put a stake in the ground first. Eighty-seven percent of the people who shop for a car don't like shopping for a car. And twenty-four percent of the people that are shopping for a car would rather have a root canal. I mean that's a pretty low bar to overcome. Why do they feel that way? They feel that way because the deal is not transparent. People don't, it's not that the cards are stacked against you, it's you don't even know what the rules are. Okay? So I'm writing an ancillary book and it's called 'A Bad Deal at Any Price'. Right? You remember Ralph Nader had you know, 'Unsafe at Any Speed'. It's a bad deal at any price. You don't know when you're getting a good deal because you don't know the system and you don't know where the dealer makes money. And if I can educate you, it's like Sy Syms said years ago, 'An educated consumer is our best customer'. I can garner you as a loyal customer, and I had an agricultural metaphor analogy here. I wanted to plant an orchard that gave us apples every year that would be get more apples and more, and rather than selling firewood. So we took care of our customers in a really extraordinary way. We got an ethical award from the Rochester Area Business Ethics Foundation for the Better Business Bureau. And what we did is we cut out those things that people hate. Commissioned salespeople. Now there's nothing wrong with commission salespeople. A lot of commission salespeople, you know, for real estate and whatever, even the car business, are perfectly fine. But in a commission sales system, it's a zero-sum game. The more that you pay, okay, the more the salesperson makes. All right. So when you have a really seasonal business like we have here in Rochester, New York, you're in Michigan, you know what it's like when it gets to be February. It gets dark at four o'clock in the afternoon. You might see a customer here, a customer there. The salesperson is automatically put in this moral dilemma. I mean, you have somebody, do you kind of try to drain every dime that you can out of them so you can pay your mortgage? Or do you treat them as somebody you're looking out in their best interest? I'm not saying that's necessarily wrong, commissioned salespeople, but you put them in a position that they shouldn't be in. So the other thing is that because the dealers are buying the cars for the same price, there are other ways they are making money on you that you are not aware of. Okay? And it's not necessarily the big dealer or the little dealer that has the advantage. You have to know what the process is. So I teach the process because people shop mainly price, price, price, price, price, price. However, however, there is the price of the car, there's the trade in value, there's the financing, how much money you're putting down. All of these things are an equation that you need to navigate. And one of the things that a lot of dealers do is purposely keep you in the dark. And there are other tactics. There's something called the Ad car. Okay. The ad car, a dealer puts car ad in the paper, spends fifty thousand dollars, and it's for that one car. Okay. I mean, it it's bait and switch. You have to have ethically enough of an inventory to satisfy that and there's a difference between a price leader and a bait and switch. A price leader is McDonald's. You go for the dollar hamburger, McDonald's never says to you well we don't have any dollar hamburgers anymore you have to go buy a Big Mac. No a dollar hamburger is a dollar hamburger. It's a price leader. It's very common in the car business is to put an ad on TV or the radio or in print and you really can't get that car. They might have one or two of them and they spend fifty thousand dollars on the ad. And why do they do that? They do that to get you in. And once you get in there, then you become part of the process and they start working on you. You know, I give you the strategy and tactics how to handle this whole thing. I mean it's not nuclear science. It's just people have to be not as nice. You know, it's like your financing. We can talk about financing with the four C's of credit. I mean, I've seen people with great credit that can't get a loan. I understand that. I'll explain why, you know. Marci (07:54) Yeah, why don't you go with that right now? How can you if you've got great credit, why can't you get the loan? Dominic Genova (07:59) Okay. There are, this goes back to my college days and it's still relevant. There are four C's of credit. It's collateral, okay? I mean how much are you borrowing against you know the worth of whatever it is. It is credit, how well you've been paying your credit over the years, okay. So your FICO score. Your FICO score can be eight hundred and you still might not get a loan, okay? And it's character, have you had steady employment, you know. I mean, do you work for the government, yeah, okay, we can understand that you're probably gonna get you know, you're probably gonna get paid, you know, maybe not on time, but you're probably gonna get paid. Or are you an independent contractor or whatever. And the other one, and we all got caught up into this in 2008, capacity. Capacity. Okay. So back then they were looking at especially with the mortgage business. Well, you know, they've been paying their mortgage all along, and okay, we'll approve the loan. No, no, if you've been paying five hundred dollars a month for a car payment and your new payment is fifteen hundred dollars, the bank might turn you down because of capacity. Your debt-to-income ratio is not what they're looking for, and they're afraid that you're gonna default on the loan, and maybe if they don't turn you down they're not going to give you all the money you want. Okay? So the four C's of credit is common sense. Now there's ways of figuring this out. There's ways of going in to a dealer and constructing a way of negotiating with the dealer that is it's let's put it this way. Are you a football fan? Does faking a pass draw a flag? Faking a pass does not draw a flag. You don't get penalized for making out like you're gonna pass. Marci (09:44) All right. Dominic Genova (09:44) Right? Okay, so if you if you approach a dealer and don't show them all of your cards, that's okay. It's not unethical to say, well, you want your payment to be $420. Why do you tell them $420 or $440? Why do you tell them 390? Why do you share all your cards? And when you get into the thing of price, it like I said, so it's price, your trade-in and the amount of money down, why tip all your cards? I mean now think about this. So you gotta put one of the stakes in the ground. Put one of the stakes in the ground is the price of the car. So there's a way of getting the price of the car most naturally without those other things. And those other things I teach you how to negotiate through that too. Because like with a used car. Used cars are very variable, and you really can't go online and say how much your used car is worth. It depends how many cars that the dealer has too. So if you come in with a minivan and I have 15 minivans in stock, you know. Ugh, I can't get rid of the ones I have now, right? Marci (10:45) Right. Dominic Genova (10:46) So the dealer down the road, dealer could be 10 miles down the road. He's not in that situation. Maybe he has somebody who's looking for the exact minivan that you have. So you can get a ballpark, you can get something they call an ACV, an actual cash value on the vehicle. It's kind of easy to do. I show you how to do that. So you know what a ballpark is. I use the example. Our dealership was south of Rochester, New York, by not that much, maybe 15 miles or so. If you came into the city with a stick shift Dodge Dakota, there was no market for it up in the city because it's a city. We're out in the country, and there's a lot of these, yeah, especially these young people that are working at farms, a stick shift Dakota is like gold to them. So that car is worth more money to me. Somebody came in once with an Audi TT, a hundred thousand dollar Audi. What am I gonna do with it? You know, I'm out in the country. There's nobody there for that. So I have to wholesale the car. So that's the other thing about used cars. You know, but I go through all this in the book. I have a dealer to English dictionary. My favorite example is that there's a dealer's advertising, this is very true. A dealer's advertising a a payment, and he says, Your payment on this Jeep is $299. Your payment is, okay, this dealer to English dictionary. You know what word he left out? It's not monthly. It was every other week. So it's a five hundred ninety-eight dollar payment. Marci (11:58) Every other week. Dominic Genova (11:59) Every other week. Yeah. So I try to show you like in the mouse print we call it the disclaimer, what to look out for, like rebates. I mean a dealer will advertise there's seventy five hundred dollars worth of rebates. It's not seventy five hundred dollars worth of rebates. If you combine the ones you can't get in combination, there are. There are rebates that come from the manufacturer that are there as long as you're a human being, you get this rebate. And then there's one for recent college grad. There's one for military, there's one for whatever it is. They're not stackable. You can't get them all. Marci (12:32) And chances are you wouldn't qualify for them all. Dominic Genova (12:35) Absolutely. But a dealer might advertise a price that's you know thousands less than another dealer, and it says all rebates apply. And then when you get there, you're too nice. That included this. Are you that? No. Are you that? No. Oh, okay, well, you know, you're only eligible for the standard rebate, but then you're there. Then you're there. And what's the most the biggest problem people have, I hate to say this, they're too nice. Marci (13:00) Right, you gotta be willing to say no and walk away. Dominic Genova (13:03) Absolutely. The thing I teach and people are like when I give these lectures, you know, they say, well, how do you know when you talk to the salesperson? But ask them a question you know the answer to. It's great. So if they go back and they go, Well, I don't know the answer to that, I'll go find out. That's fine. If they treat you with respect, that's fine too. If they treat you with disrespect, I mean, ask them even a silly question sometimes, you know, see how, you know, say how they talk. Or, you know, I have to go talk to my manager or whatever. But ask them a question that you know the answer to and see how they're responding to that. Do they go find out or do they give you a bunch of bull? Yeah. I remember doing sales training once at a car dealership when I was working for Chrysler and I asked the salesperson, open the hood of the truck, I says, What kind of engine does that? it was a young woman, she goes, Well, that's obviously a 318 V8. I says, why are there only six spark plugs there? Ask her a question you know the answer to. And then there's other things. My wife just recently, there was a deer that decided that life wasn't worth living and decided to jump on her car and they had to total the car, believe it or not. Well she's fine. I might not getting prices, you know. And I'm telling people, I used to be a car dealer, so you know, just don't do this crap to me. And I get I still get this, you know, three hundred ninety-nine dollars for nitrogen for your tires. I told you I'm in the business. I know that's a bunch of bull. my God. So the dealer can make money on a lot of things. The financing is the one thing. They bump the interest rate, obviously. So they can make three points on you or four points on you. There's a way to handle that. Okay. you can actually get a lower rate at your dealership, theoretically, than you can get from your own bank. That's a nice little trick. And all the other gobbledygook, the you have to see if this stuff is worth it because it that's where the money is. The money is not in the cars because the dealers are competing against each other for the price of the cars, so they're all relatively in the same spot, and they're making the money on all this other stuff that you don't shop. You don't shop that stuff. Marci (15:11) Right, 'cause you assume it's the same for all the dealerships. They're all gonna have the title, they're all gonna have the this and the that, and you're saying that's not necessarily the case. Dominic Genova (15:20) Yeah, and there's other things too. You buy a car out of state. There's something called a dock fee, documentary fee. Now it's at the state of New York we can only charge you a hundred and seventy five dollars for a documentary fee. Okay? Now that's the last line before the cash price and before the whole deal. And in Florida it can be anything. It could be like a thousand dollars. In New Jersey, same thing, it could be eight hundred, thousand dollars. So you thinking you're gonna get a better price, but you're not gonna get a better price. The other the other thing I want to I want to teach people too is something called a delivery bump. Okay? A delivery bump. So you went out and you found a car that was $500 cheaper because this dealership had it. Okay? And he says your payment's gonna be about $420 a month, let's say. So on delivery, because he didn't give you hard figures for the financing, well your $420 just became $440. That's twenty dollars a month. And you know most people are like, well, you know, that's not too bad, you know, twenty dollars a month. The whole deal is that if they bump you by twenty dollars a month on a sixty-month contract, that's twelve hundred dollars. One of the questions that I get asked all the time and people need to change their thinking on this. I had a lecture once, eighty people, and everybody was pretty much happy. Although I got one woman who was very upset. She goes, I don't think this is worth anything. Well, why do you feel that way? She goes, well, I wanted to know what the dealer's invoice price was and how they get the car for the dealer cost, and what this, that, and the other thing. And I didn't find anything about you know what the car costs the dealer, And I said, you're really looking at this wrong. Because what something costs somebody has nothing to do with what they're willing to sell it for. Marci (17:07) Not only that, the dealer gets to make money, their employees get to make money. I mean, I don't expect them to operate this for a net zero. Dominic Genova (17:15) It's nice that you say that, but I've actually had a customer who told me he didn't care. I said, you know, I need to make a little bit of money to pay my people and whatever. And he goes, I don't care. So I told him we were not the best place to do business. You know. Really, that's the way you feel. I mean this isn't the place for you. But here's the metaphor of the analogy, is that you go to the grocery store and you're looking for a box of Kellogg's cornflakes and whatever, you find out that size box and what the one grocery store is willing to sell it to you for, and the other grocery store what they're gonna sell it to you for. What they pay for it is totally irrelevant. Marci (17:51) Yeah, people get focused on what the dealer's cost was and that's really irrelevant because the cost of the vehicle doesn't take into account all of the overhead, all of the other things that go into the equation and really you want the best deal you can get. And you have to figure out how to deal with that and get that within.... can you imagine trying to shop for everything based on what you think the cost was? Dominic Genova (18:16) Yeah, and you know, I used a little bit of humor when I started the dealership because I never sold cars until I started the dealership. I worked for Motorola for a while selling two-way radios like the cops use in the South Bronx of all places. I would say to a customer, he says, you know, I know you want to get the car for free. Okay, you want to get the car for free, and I wanna make three point five million dollars on you and retire. Somewhere in the middle, we're gonna have to settle, and you're gonna think that you could have got it for less money, and I'm gonna think that I could have sold it to somebody for more money. I go, that's the way the human mind works. Okay? So we're gonna be equally satisfied or dissatisfied, but it's gonna be something that we both can live with. And when we both can live with something, that's when it's called a deal. You have a deal, okay? And you can feel comfortable that when I sell you a warranty, I'm not going to sell some crazy warranty based in the Cayman Islands that you can only get on Tuesdays. It's going to be a factory warranty. If I put parts in your car, they're going to be Chrysler approved parts. We do quality work. Especially our service department. We don't under-repair your car, we don't over-repair your car. We do a proper analysis of what you need and we advise you, and then you can make your own decision. And when you start having a relationship that like that with your customers, your customers come back the next time. They don't even negotiate anymore because they know they're getting a good deal. Marci (19:41) Right. Dominic Genova (19:41) We had a weather caster, he's really a great guy, and he died quite early. He was in his 40s and he had a cancer, and he said, I buy my cars from Dom because at least I know I'm not getting screwed. You know, I mean, okay, Marci (19:53) Fair. Dominic Genova (19:54) that's the bar. The bar is that he figures it's a fair deal. He wants to deal with somebody who has his best interests at heart. You know, the people that bought my dealership, that's a big dealer group and that's where the industry is going, it's these big dealer groups. Marci (20:07) Do you think people get a better deal when they go to an independent or a one or two shop show rather than going to something that's owned by the company? Dominic Genova (20:17) It's like that underwear. Depends. Marci (20:20) Okay. Well then I guess this is a great place to ask about your trust test. Dominic Genova (20:27) Yeah, the trust test is first of all you have to have people that subscribe to the culture because it's a culture. Okay. Now when I was working for Chrysler, they had this system of like a hundred and fifteen things that has to happen at the dealership to make a customer satisfied. Like what's your culture? If your culture is proper, everything flows from that. And I'll give you an example. Most dealers have a certain amount of money that a customer can get paid if he's dissatisfied with something. And the drive line, you know, well yeah, if it's seventy-five dollars, just take care of the customer. My thing was we could spend an unlimited amount of money on the customer, if he deserves it and we did something wrong. If we did something and we broke his transmission as three thousand dollars and we're gonna end up giving it to him anyway, why argue with the guy? You know, the most that's gonna happen is I lose money that I shouldn't have lost, right? But in the meantime in the meantime, why put a customer through angst and anxiety for something and have it to take him up the ladder to get what he wants. I was on a committee for a Ford a consumer experience movement and You know, we discussed these things. the committee was headed by Elena Ford and you know how do you get the culture at the dealership? And the thing is that the culture comes from the people and people that are put in the right direction and have the right attitude will do the right thing and that's what you do. You gotta find those people. Somebody asked me once, well how do you get these people that feel that way? Well it's just interviewing any anybody for anything. You find somebody who subscribes to that and a lot of car salesmen frankly want a a relationship with their customers where they come back again and again, again and again. I had one guy that worked for me for 26 years. Twenty-six years Marci (22:12) Okay, still gonna take you back to that questions consumers should ask before any major purchase. Is that something in your book or something you can discuss here? Dominic Genova (22:20) So it's the price of the car, it's your trade in value, it is how much money you're putting down, and it's your monthly payment. So the thing is to get to those four things you have to get to it's some type of an idea of where you stand on this deal. So the first thing you do is you get the dealer to agree on a price and you tell the dealer that you don't have a trade-in and you're not financing. Okay, this is what I mean about faking the pass. So now you have one of the four corners that is ingrained in stone. You know what the price of the car is if you're going to peel off hundred-dollar bills, right? Because you're not doing the rest of this stuff. So as far as the trade-in value goes, you go to a couple of places online of where they will pay you to buy the car, whether you buy their car or not. So you go like to CarMax. You go to CarMax and CarMax will give you a guaranteed price on your car, whether you trade it in or not. Carvana is the same thing. All right. So you're getting an A C V. You can go look it up in a Kelly Blue book and stuff, but at least it gives you a ballpark. Now you have to understand that they're trying to get it for a good price too. So it's probably a little bit less than the car is actually worth. The other thing is your financing. Now your financing, the dealer gets a better deal for the financing a lot of cases than you can get at your own bank. Can you believe that? Right? Marci (23:34) Yeah, I've noticed that. Dominic Genova (23:36) Yeah, so you go to your bank and they'll give you an over-the-counter rate, let's say, of six and a half percent. Well, the dealer's rate is six percent, and he can make the half a percent, one percent, two percent, whatever, but his percent is called retention rate. The retention is like could be lower than the rate you're getting from your own bank at that dealer. Okay? Now, what he's gonna make on that, he's gonna make a flat fee. Okay, he's gonna make like three hundred dollars, but he's not gonna make three thousand dollars. Okay? So you have some type of an idea, once you go to the bank and you get an approval from them, okay, you don't need to use their financing. You can use that to say, hey, I got this financing now. And now you have the information that you need. You got the cash price of the car, you got some type of an idea of what your trade in is worth, and you know what your financing should be, a ballpark on your financing, or at least your interest rate should be. And then you go from there. Now the other thing to do is understand that you are buying something that you probably can't return. Okay? I used to tell my salespeople, cars are like shoes. They have to be comfortable, affordable, a style you like, and you can't return them easily. Okay? So be careful when you're buying the car. To try the car on, make sure that the A pillars aren't in your way. The you know the front pillars of the car aren't in your way when you're making a turn. You can see out the back, the seats are comfortable. You have to be careful because you're gonna have to live with that for a long time. Don't buy a car with a longer finance program than the car's gonna last. That happens all the time. And the other thing is that I teach people the difference between leasing and buying because that's the other big question I always get. Leasing and buying. I mean leasing is like it I mean it's like a hammer. You know, hammer makes a wonderful tool and a terrible weapon. So dealers will you know typically saying if do you want to get into leasing, do we have time for this? Marci (25:25) Sure. Dominic Genova (25:26) Okay, so here's the thing with the lease. A lease is a lifestyle thing. If you get into a lease because you like turning in your keys every three years and getting something new and the warranty covers all the repairs on the cars and you know you might need to buy a set of tires, but probably not if you have a two or three year lease. And you go and hand the keys back and you get something else, okay. Lifestyle. Okay, as long as the mileage that you're driving is okay. The thing that a lot of dealers like to do, this is the hammer, used as a weapon. They give you a really great lease. Okay? They give you $220 a month, the residual is 50%, the buyout on the car is, you know, let's say it's a $30,000 car, the buyout is $15,000. Okay. Now they wrote you into a 7,000 mile lease. You're driving 17,000 miles a year. So says ten thousand miles a year times three times twenty-five cents a mile. Okay. Well do the math. You got what, seventy five hundred dollars worth of penalty to pay, right? Marci (26:27) Right. Dominic Genova (26:27) Okay, at the end of the lease. Now that's the penalty you pay if you just write the check for that, which is bad enough. But what most people do, they say, Well, what's the residual on the car? Well, fifteen thousand dollars. Well, geez, I'd rather buy the car for the fifteen thousand dollars than pay the seventy-five hundred dollar fee. So what did you just do? You lease the car for three years, right? And then you're going to what? Finance the car for another, you know, what? Six years? You can have like nine-year financing on this thing? You know, so you're gonna lease to own. You don't lease to own. Marci (27:03) You might as well just finance it from the beginning and buy a car. Dominic Genova (27:06) Right, I mean and think about this. I mean if you buy a car and you trade it in every three years, you don't own the car anyway. Marci (27:12) Right. Dominic Genova (27:13) And then you gotta be careful of the zero percent thing. Well zero percent financing a lot of times you gotta give up the rebate. Okay, so if I'm gonna give up a $5,000 rebate for 0%, but I'm gonna trade it in in three years, I'm not getting the total value of the zero percent, right? So people don't understand. They gave up the rebate to get the zero percent. But the other thing is the dealer to English Dictionary. When you see a dealer and he says it's you know $399 a month and you own it. That's a key word. That is like the number one key word that should really raise your antenna. And you own it. What he's saying is that he has this hybrid deal where it's just like a lease but the car is titled to you because a lot of people want ownership. So rather than being titled to the lease company, it's titled to you but it's the same deal with the mileage and stuff and you gotta turn the car back in and you own it. You also own a big balloon payment at the end of the term. I got some comical stories in there too. I mean I mean I've been in business for so long. Marci (28:19) That's what happens as you are in a business and obviously you bought cars before you started selling cars, so you had the experience from both sides. It's not like you were born into a family that sells cars, you inherited their Dominic Genova (28:32) No. Marci (28:33) business and you never had to have the experience from the other side. Let's talk about buyers shopping the price instead of the payment. Dominic Genova (28:41) Yeah, well the typical thing that they'll do at the dealership level is they'll ask you, you know, what do you want your payment to be? And a lot of people they actually tell you more than they're comfortable with. You know, there's sort of like a sense of pride or whatever. They want to be $450. I can go up to $475. But no, once you tell him $475, where's he gonna be? $495. Right? So, you know, hold your cards a little closer to your vest. And the other thing is that when you're shopping online, you gotta make sure that they're not including rebates that you can't get. And you want an out-the-door price. If you go to a dealership and they won't give you an out-door door price, just leave. Leave. We don't. I mean, the other thing that a lot of guys do, they ask you for a deposit. You go and you talk to the salesperson, he says, Well, I gotta take that to my boss and see. But I want $50 from you, you know, to show that you're serious about buying a car. Okay, let me see your credit card, okay, and I'll keep it until I get my $50 back. I mean, that type of stuff. And you know, I've actually seen the cases where people they held the keys. You know, they can't find the keys. You know, we don't know where your keys are to your car. They take the car on the test drive and they keep the keys. You know, they keep you there. There's some really unethical dealers out there. I'm not saying all dealers are like that. I'm saying you need to understand that and I was talking to Letitia James of all people, the attorney general here in New York, I was at a meeting and she was there. And I said I said Letitia, I said it's a it It's a case where we all drive 70 in a 65. We all do that, okay? I said, but you know, some of these guys are going, you know, they're drunk driving, they're going 200 miles an hour, whatever. I said, some of these guys that are out there, you're not hammering these guys, and you really should. I mean, you know, the guy with the $299 that's really $598. I look at it this way: this guy is fishing with a net upstream from me, and I don't see who he's netting. Okay? People are going there, they're getting cheated, snookered, whatever, and I don't see them. And I consider myself a good dealer. So other good dealers aren't seeing these guys either. Okay? So it's good for people to know how things work. Now the expectation's got to be it's a fair deal. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Alright? It's a fair deal. And more than likely, it's not like eating the cornflake or even buying a TV now. You buy a TV, the TV breaks, you throw the TV away, right? You're gonna need service. You're gonna need service somebody's reputable with service. And the service you can't get somebody don't over-repair or under-repair my car. They're equally as bad. I don't want you quoting me something I don't need, but if I need it, I want you telling me about it so I can make a decision whether I want it done or not. And I got plenty of that. Why didn't you tell me that I needed such and such when I came in, because I would have got that done now rather than coming back, like two months from now. Yeah, that's good too. So and as far as reviews go, you can look at Yelp and all these other things, and a lot of them are pay-for-play. The worst, in my opinion, is the Better Business Bureau. The Better Business Bureau accredits dealers and accredits all businesses, they never visit your place. To be accredited you have to pay them a substantial amount of money per year. it had been facilitated by an outside company. I don't know if they still do that, but the fellow would call you up or the gal would call you up and say, I'm from this better business bureau, you need to call me. And you call up and they're trying to sell you the program. And I actually have a recording of an argument I got in one with one of them. I said, Well, you're validating, well, actually, it was the guy with the $299, the every other week payment. I say, you have him down validated. He goes, well, we don't know he's doing that. I go, but he has. He says, Well, you need to report that. It's not my job to report this. Okay? So you gotta take that stuff with a grain of salt. I like looking at Google reviews and looking in between the lines. And then seeing if there's specific things that they're saying. You know, somebody says, it's the worst. You know, okay. You know, well and they don't mention anybody. You know, I want the people to be brutally honest. That's the only way I can figure out what I'm doing right or doing wrong. Be brutal don't be brutal, but be brutally honest. You know, something goes wrong. I want it fixed. Marci (32:51) That makes sense. People don't think of it. They get uncomfortable, as you say. They're too nice. They don't wanna walk away. They don't wanna question things. And so instead what they're giving up because they don't want to go into that uncomfortable space is they're giving up money and sometimes significant amounts because a car is not an inexpensive purchase. Dominic Genova (33:10) Right. Or the worst thing is fitting themselves into something that Yeah, they talk themselves into it. I'll tell you the saddest story, The saddest story was when I first started in nineteen ninety four, ninety-five, this young couple comes into me. Young guy, they're in their thirties. They have a Ford Bronco that they bought from the dealership down the road last year. The thing had like a hundred and fifteen thousand miles on it when they bought it. Okay. Five year financing. I don't know how they got the five year enough financing. Now the vehicle had a hundred and twenty five thousand miles on it, and the engine was blown. They can't afford to get the engine fixed and the vehicle itself is worthless. Marci (33:49) And they still owe four years. Dominic Genova (33:51) Yeah. And so you bankrupted this couple. I mean they don't have the money for this, you bankrupt and why did you do that? Really made me angry. How small is your soul that you would do that? They were naive. They didn't know what they were doing. And I'm not saying that's common. I'm saying you need to be aware of that. I mean, the same dealer, a customer came in to me once, he says, I went to get delivery of my Ford, and they were giving me an XL, not an XLT. He says, I agreed on an XLT. This is what you could afford. He says, you know, the heck with you, you know, just you know, give me my deposit back, I'm leaving. And a lot of people don't do that. You don't need to be angry, you need to be firm. Marci (34:31) That makes sense. Anyway, Dom, before we wrap up, have you got anything you want to cover that maybe we haven't talked about? Dominic Genova (34:39) No, I just appreciate the ability that you're affording me to spread the word. I give these talks, I have my book, and what I'm trying to do is you can't save everybody, but you can save some people. I mean, some people will take this message and they will take it to heart and maybe if they save a couple of bucks so they get a better deal than they would have had. Or deal with an ethical dealer rather than getting snookered, then my job is complete. And the other thing is I'll just say my webpage is DontBeTaken.com. So we have a lot of other information there, whether you buy the book or not, but it's DontBeTaken.com. The book is available on Amazon. I appreciate your patience, I appreciate what you do. You're doing the same thing I'm trying to do, is help people navigate things that maybe they should be familiar with that they're not. So that's good. So God bless you for what you do and thanks for your patience. Marci (35:33) Dom, thank you so much for being my guest today. We appreciate you taking the time to join us here. Dominic Genova (35:38) Well, thank you so much. Marci (35:39) And to my listeners, I will be sharing a link to Dom's information in the show notes. Please check him out. He has a lot of interesting information in case you couldn't already tell. And don't forget to subscribe, leave us a review, and stay tuned. I'll see you next time. This has been MoneyMarci on Marci Talks Money (and Life). You got this.