Selling your ride used to be a challenging process. You would either have to haul it or pray it would roll under its own power all the way to a used car place, and then try to pretend it still worked okay until you could negotiate a deal for it before slinking away with a tiny sum of money. Fortunately, some things in this world can change.

One thing you can do these days to sell your ride is actually to clean it up. Believe it or not, you can get more cash for cars when they’re clean than you can when they’re dirty. While you might not believe this is possible, it’s as much the case today as it was when Donald Trump wrote about it in “The Art of the Deal” many years ago. It’s just easier to sell something that is clean than something that is dirty.

Another thing you can do to sell your ride more effectively is to sell it by way of an online company. When you place an ad that says, “buy my car,” it should be easy. Plenty of companies allow you to put up photos for either no money or a paltry sum, and let people who are browsing for a good deal come on through at their leisure. So when someone takes a shine to your particular car, they can arrange to come check it out at a mutually agreed upon time. From there, you can sign over the paperwork and let the car go for an agreeable price, or at least for the best amount you can get.