Lyle Pruitt walked down the street on a Sunday afternoon with his hands in his jacket pockets, stood next to the Silverado for a while without saying anything, and then said, "You ever think about selling this?" Lyle is in his seventies, spent his working life fixing combines, and owns the good torque wrench. When he asks a question like that, I listen.
His grandson needs a truck for a farm job this summer. Lyle had looked the Silverado over more than once while I was working on it, and he knows exactly what's been done to it, because he was standing there for half of it. He offered $15,000 cash. He said I could think about it.
So I thought about it for a week, mostly with a pencil.
What the truck is worth on paper
The odometer read 145,000 even last Tuesday, which felt like a sign of something. It's a 2014 LT crew cab, 5.3 V8, 4WD, dark gray. We bought it in 2019 with 74,000 miles on it. I priced it again on the same three valuation sites I used last spring:
- Trade-in: $12,400 to $13,900
- Private party: $15,200 to $16,800
- Same truck last May, at about 134,000: $16,500 to $18,200 private party
So Lyle's offer is right at the low end of private party, from a buyer I trust, with no listing, no strangers in my driveway and no test drives. That's a fair offer. It's actually a good one when you count my time.
Two things probably drag the number down. The deer hit in November is on the vehicle history now, even though the repair was done right and paid through a comprehensive claim. And the rocker panels have the kind of rust you get from seven Missouri winters of road salt.
What a replacement would cost
Here's where the idea falls apart. If I sell the truck, I need something to drive 22 miles a day to the terminal. I don't need a pickup for that, but I use the bed for the landfill run, Dad's yard projects and the occasional piece of furniture.
A comparable half-ton crew cab, five or six years newer with 60,000 to 80,000 miles, is $28,000 to $34,000 in Kansas City right now. Even a used compact car that would do the commute fine is $12,000 to $16,000 for anything I'd trust. Then add sales tax and fees at the license office, and the insurance on a newer vehicle that I'd want full coverage on.
So selling to Lyle at $15,000 and buying a $30,000 truck means finding another $15,000 plus tax. Selling and buying a $14,000 commuter car means losing the bed and getting about the same value in a smaller box. Neither one makes me money.
I pulled the repair lines from the spreadsheet for the past twelve months: a $612 water pump last August and a $386 front-axle actuator in February after the ice storm. That's $998 in shop bills, plus the $500 deductible on the deer, which I don't count against the truck because the deer started it. Call it $1,000 a year in repairs, about $85 a month. Add oil changes I do myself at around $46 each.
Fuel is the real cost. At about 16 mpg commuting and gas at $3.29 this month, the commute alone runs around $95 a month. Andre and I started carpooling twice a week this month, which knocks about $41 off that. That's the cheapest improvement I've made to the truck in years, and it didn't involve a wrench.
A $500 or $600 monthly payment on something newer would be five or six times what the Silverado costs me in repairs. Even if the truck needs a $2,500 repair next year, I'd still be ahead.
Why I said no
I told Lyle on Saturday. I said the truck isn't for sale yet, and that if it ever is, he gets the first call, and he can tell his grandson that from me. He nodded like he'd expected it. Then he asked if I'd noticed a little shudder from the transmission around 45 miles an hour. I had. He said, "Get the fluid looked at before it gets worse." I wrote it in the notebook under June.
We'll run it till it tells us otherwise. At 145,000 miles, it hasn't told us anything we can't afford to fix. I'll keep a column in the spreadsheet for "what Lyle would pay" and check it against the repair column once a year. The day the repairs pass the offer is the day I walk three houses down.