New vs Used Dual Sport

[biowza]

Hi,

I have arrived in Vancouver yesterday with a friend of mine and we are looking to travel down through to Argentina over the next 8-10 months. We've spent today going around to motorcycle dealerships to get a general idea of the type of bikes we want, as well as to see what sort of price we can expect. We've been looking mainly towards two bikes, the dr 650, and the klr 650 (also have heard some good things about the dr z400)

It would seem a lot of people are recommending to buy a brand new bike, which would end up costing us around $5,500 (excluding taxes). This is quite a lot higher than our budget of $3-$4000, however we've been told that we will of course run in to a lot less problems with repairs, as well as a much higher resale value once we have finished our trip.

However after browsing through Craigslist, we have found a few old klr 650's for around $2,500. That would leave us with around $3,000 of room to spend on repairs and maintenance. Although we are quite inexperienced in bike repairs, it would seem unlikely that we would spend this amount on bike repairs.

Has anyone had experience buying a used bike? We're looking to find out what sort of repairs we might be looking at and roughly how much this could cost. Of course, there are many things that can go wrong mechanically with a bike, we are just looking to get a rough guide to the most common problems (with ballpark price estimates if possible).

To those who have done similar trips, did you buy a used or new bike? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance for your help

Julien