Gee, what a generous offer...

I got a snail-mail letter today from the Ford dealer I bought my Ranger from claiming that they want to buy my truck back - and they are going to generously offer me full MSRP for it.

OK, so obviously this is a standard ploy for them to get you into the dealership, so once you trade in your car/truck you need to buy another one from them.

But out of curiosity, I look at fine print, and it's a horrible deal. Not only are they offering the base MSRP (not the price you actually paid), they also deduct rebates that were on the vehicle when you bought it and take off 25 cents per mile on the vehicle.

So here's the thing. If I throw my Ranger into the Edmunds.com price guide, I get a trade-in price of $15,842 in clean condition (which includes the bedliner but not the hard tonneau cover).

On the other hand, if I pull up calc in Windows and do a little math...
a base 2007 Ranger XLT on Ford's site is $15,610.
When I bought mine, it had $3000 in rebates, so that brings it down to $12,610.
I've got a little over 14,000 miles on the truck (which is what the edmund's quote is based on). 14,000 miles at 25¢ a mile is $3500.
Subtract that and you get $9100 for the buy back - or about 2/3 of the blue book.

Now, it may be that my example is messed up because my truck had lots of rebates, and because there are a lot of options on my truck. But it seems like an incredibly bad deal to me.