BEST WAYS TO BUY A USED BIKE
There are plenty of quick easy ways to bag the bike of your dreams
With the September 1 new registrations behind us, there will be an influx of used trade-ins off the back of new model sales, releasing more used stock onto the market and giving dealers a second spike in activity. But with winter looming, it’s a great time to buy as dealers don’t want to be sitting on stock for months on end.
And, with so many ways available to pay for your bike (beyond cold,
September 21 2022 hard, cash, such as PCP, HP, bank loans and credit cards, and the increasing number of manufacturerbacked ‘approved used’ schemes, it’s never been easier, either. All of which raises an obvious question: what is the BEST way for YOU to finance a used bike? Here’s our guide to the options and the pros and cons…
Getting the best price
It may sound obvious but, if you can afford it, good old fashioned cash remains the quickest, cleanest and cheapest way to buy a used bike. It not only enables the fastest transaction with no need for excessive paperwork or credit approval, it opens up the biggest choice of bikes, both from dealers and private sellers and gives you the most leverage for haggling. The latter two factors both giving you the prospect of the best price.
But if you haven’t the available readies, using finance to buy a used bike not only increases your available budget and thus choice of bikes, it lets you pay in relatively small monthly instalments. However, there are some downsides.
Hire Purchase
HP remains the traditional and most familiar way of getting finance on a used bike. Usually provided by financial institutions such as Black Horse it’s relatively easy to arrange in the dealership and is effectively a loan over a predetermined period, for example 36 months or four years which is repaid in monthly instalments, with additional interest (as shown by the Annual Percentage Rate, or APR). At the end of this term the bike is yours.
The downsides to HP are threefold: the cost of the interest, depending on the APR, can add up to thousands over the course of the deal; the interest rates charged are usually higher than those on the
High Street were you to arrange it yourself and you may be declined by the finance company if you have a poor credit rating. This option is also not available when buying privately.
The main pros are the ease of arranging the finance at the dealer and the certainty of the bike being yours at the end of the HP period without a PCP balloon payment .
Personal loan
The obvious alternative to taking