Cash For Clunkers Isn’t So Bad After All
Wednesday, August 5th, 2009
How I’m profiting from “Cash for Clunkers”.
I’m not a fan of the government spending my tax dollars. So I haven’t been too keen about the “cash for clunkers” program, in which the government gives my tax dollars to other people to buy new cars.
When the program started to run out of cash I was even more upset. Did the government think that people wouldn’t take them up on an offer of free cash? Did they not see how much money Germany has spent on a similar program?
But my view of the program changed yesterday. You see, I calculate that my portion of the $1B program is about $20 in taxes. Yet I’ve made about $50 over the past month from the program.
Let me explain. Many years ago I bought the generic domain name CarRebate.com. Car manufacturers often offer rebates and incentives, so I thought this was a good domain name. The domain typically makes $5 a month as a parked domain. But I checked the stats yesterday and saw that it had earned about $55 over the past month thanks to people looking for information on car rebates. Traffic spiked from 10 visits or so a month to 350 in the most recent period.
Thus, I’ve netted about $30 from the program. Congress may dole out another $2B to the program, which would be another $40 out of my tax money. But as long as people keep searching for car rebates on the internet, I’ll come out ahead.
Postscript: another member of the domain media owns Clunkers.com.
Further Reading:
- Porn.com Sells for $9.5M Cash
- Cash(less) Parking
- What in the World Will ICANN Do with $100 Million Cash Next Year?
Tags: parked domains
Cash For Clunkers Isn?t So Bad After All – http://tinyurl.com/n7p5zv
All politics aside, Cash For Clunkers is actually a brilliant government program.
David C: It’s a brilliant MARKETING program. That’s what marketing can do. If more businesses made offers that are simple, and create a sense of urgency to act now, more sales would be closed and the economy would be better.
It’s all psychology. Instead of Macy’s saying Save 20-60% (which seems nothing special but normal) say Bring your old shoes to donate to charity and we’ll give you $20 for them towards the purchase of NEW shoes.
The call to action is not about saving but “Help others and treat yourself.”
thank you obama for my “domain name bailout”
Good take on it Owen.
It is certainly helping to sell cars, but the environmental effects are debatable at best, and many think it is simply shifting the existing demand for cars up a bit – which will hurt the industry down the road….
All politics aside, cash for clunkers is actually a pathetically moronic government program.
Andrew,
I’d rather just have sent you my $20 directly.
I’m not a fan of the program although I see it’s merits. So we are taking people that have clunkers, which are cars they probably don’t owe a payment on anymore, and incentivizing them to come in and borrow money to buy a new car. Uncle Sam isn’t paying for the whole car I don’t think. Just what everybody needs right now, more debt, especially against a depreciating asset.
Sure the new car is better for the environment, but IMHO the time to worry about the environment is when people arn’t losing their homes left and right.
I also jumped on the bandwagon of cash for clunkers program by purchasing CashForTradeins.com and CashForTradein.com
any potential here with these 2 domains for auto companies wanting to continue with similar program when cash for clunkers program ends?
I love how people voice incorrect statements (environmental effects are debatable) as if they are fact. Ever been to LA? The smog there isn’t coming from a magic genie creating pollution there.
The other sad fact – you are against using taxpayer money, but since it made you more money, you are suddenly okay with it. It is that kind of extreme shortsightedness of just personal gain vs societal gain that is a sad testament of where we are today.
Ahmed,
The environmental benefits of this program are 100% debatable. Producing a new car has an incredibly negative environmental impact – between the energy needed to make the car, to the raw materials required (steel, plastic, rubber, textiles, copper) etc.
While increasing miles per gallon is always a good thing, trading in a perfectly good car to improve a few MPG is not a clear cut environmental improvement.
And the car they trade in must be scrapped – which means some parts of that car can no longer be recycled or resold – which means that many people who need to buy those parts need to buy new parts – which again require more energy and resources.
@ AhmedF – this post is tongue-in-cheek. Of course I’d rather not have the gov do this program.
Removed comment
Interesting that the “clunkers” were all Jeeps and GM
being traded in for Honda etc. That means the biggest waste of our money was buying those clunker companies then sending a 250K car order to the competition
Well if your financing a 30k car, it will end up costing 40k. Not including sales tax of 7%.30×7=2100.00 there goes most of you cash for clunkers rebate on the car going to tax.
Then its worth about 10k in 5 years. Horrible investment.
I would rather borrow money and buy a great domain name for 40k. I wonder if we can trade in some of our domain names for this program?
D – that is a staggeringly stupid and horrendously inappropriate remark. Do you think adding a smiley face to a offensive remark like that makes it all better? Even if you knew the person you were talking about like that, this isn’t the place for that kind of thing at all.
C4C is bad for charity car donation because the amount of the voucher is much greater than the tax deduction aperson receives when they donate their car. the only cars being donated now are those that don’t qualify for a voucher because they don’t run. Those car are sold at scrap yards. Of course the price of scrap metal has greatly decreased due to the flood of c4c cars.
GM was advertising last night using a category, which get’s people Searching.
GM.com/CarsRebate
It was plural, but should help your domain as well.
Leave it to GM as they do not cover them self on the typo (leaving off the S) as gm.com/CarRebate brings to you nothing to do with the C4C but it does resolve to gm.com/vehicles/ .
Perhaps I could sell Clunker.Tel to GM right? or perhaps I could somehow let people and dealers trade their clunkers on Clunker.tel.
Clunker.tel now that’s a clunker of a domain name.