When buying a new car or your first vehicle, you might be keen to maximize your budget by selecting a car that’s a project and needs a lot of work. This can be a great way to get the type of vehicle you might not otherwise afford or to upsize to a bigger or different car. However, there are also some potential downsides to purchasing a project.

You must complete plenty of due diligence to understand what’s likely to be involved and if it will be worth it in the long run. To ensure you don’t bite off more than you can chew, here are some top factors to think about before committing to the fixer-upper vehicle you’re considering.

Clarify Your Goals

For starters, it’s wise to determine your goals for the car you’re thinking of buying. What do you hope to achieve from ownership, and what might you expect from the project? For instance, are you looking to make a certain amount of money from doing the car up and then selling it again, or are you keen to fulfill a lifelong dream of owning a particular type of vehicle?

Perhaps you want to buy your first car, and a project is the most affordable way to do it, or you want to purchase a fixer-upper that you can spend quality time working on with your child over the coming years to create a memorable bonding experience. There’s no right or wrong here; you just need to consider your specific goals to tell if the car you’re considering will help you achieve them or not.

Determine Your Total Available Budget

The next step is to think about your budget. How much can you afford and feel comfortable spending on bringing a car back to life? When considering a total dollar figure to allocate to the project, factor in all the costs involved. For example, in addition to the purchase price you pay the seller, you may also have to pay for registration, insurance, and storage fees if you need to keep it off-site somewhere.

There are car parts to be factored in, as well as fuel and the particular car tools you might need to buy from an online tool store to complete the project. If you’re planning to obtain a personal loan or other time of finance to buy the car, there are costs involved in this, too. Add up all the different expenses you may have to cover to ensure that the fixer-upper you’re looking at will actually be within your budget.

Check Parts Will Be Available

Before you go ahead and sign an agreement to buy a car that needs plenty of work, it’s also essential to ensure you’ll be able to get the parts you need to fix it up. This isn’t a given; some can be especially hard to source. Search for crucial items first, such as brakes, engines, transmissions, headlights, fenders, and so on.

Doing this research will assist you in gauging the parts availability for the vehicle and provide an important red flag to consider heavily if you find that it will be very tricky to get all the elements you need to get the car running and roadworthy again.

Get a Mechanic to Inspect the Car

Remember that the car you’re keen to buy may have deep-rooted damage that isn’t visible or needs specialist expertise to spot. You should pay for a vehicle history report to find out if the car has been in any significant accidents or the like, and then take it to a mechanic to see what they think about the vehicle’s state.

While someone selling a product may say that it runs okay or only has certain problems, you don’t know if they’re telling the truth or just don’t know any better, so you can’t simply take their word for it. A mechanic, though, is skilled at diagnosing problems, such as flood, fire, dust or rust damage, broken or missing wires, a dying engine, etc. Plus, you may like to get your mechanic to check the car is driveable if you plan to drive it home after buying it, rather than getting it towed to your premises.

Some other considerations before committing to buying a fixer-upper vehicle are thinking about the order in which jobs need completing and what might be required before you can drive the car, as well as looking into the best ways to add value for resale, if you don’t plan to keep the car long-term.

Buying a vehicle that needs lots of work can be a good investment, but only if you know how well different makes and models hold their value, how popular they are, precisely what the car needs to have done to it, and if you will have the time, money, energy, and patience to finish everything.

Keep all the above factors in mind when weighing up your decision rather than saying yes to buying a car based only on its current sale price.