If buying a german car you will want $500-1500 leftover after the fact that you can keep for emergency maintanence money. so if $6000 is every dime you have, you should not be looking at $6000 cars imo (do you have more than 6?). If you have already taken this into consideration and have more than 6k and want to spend 6k on the actual vehicle, then i agree with everyone that first off, try to stay within 110k miles or less. Maybe look for a '96 well kept A4 with 80k or less miles, and save yourself some trouble and maybe some money. Other ideas would be something like a 1995-97 BMW 325-328. These too are nice cars.

all imo though; i spent like a year of my life car searching haha, i just bought mine like 3 months ago, first car.

 

hes from malaysia, so his prices and conversions mean nothing to us. different economies.

 

I will add my $.02 worth since I found myself in the same situation a month ago and I actually bought it. I was warned just as you are being warned to not buy it. I went ahead and bought mine for a little over 6K, but it was a sport edition, with extra snow tires, well kept, and had the top of the motor done just last year (with timing belt). It also had good records of regular oil changes nearly every 3K miles since new. I felt the previous owner took well care of it, but I know it will still have it's problems. I am confident in my abilities to be able to fix it when something goes wrong... but my confidence comes more from my inability to afford someone else to fix it for me. So far it has been running good and the only problem I really have (besides the crappy sound system) is a small coolant leak. Looks like and easy fix when I get the chance. Good luck with your search.