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If you took the amount of money I've spent in the last year keeping old cars running and divided it by 12, they would easily make a decent car payment. I've got so much money into my car that I basically have no choice but to drive it into the ground just to get my repair "investments" back. Sometimes buying new just makes more sense...
Forget the money.......strand me on the side of the road and it will get traded shortly thereafter!
I buy brand new and maintain it my way, drive it for double the payments (pay for 5 years, drive for 10+, pay for 3, drive for 6+).
Forget the money.......strand me on the side of the road and it will get traded shortly thereafter!
I buy brand new and maintain it my way, drive it for double the payments (pay for 5 years, drive for 10+, pay for 3, drive for 6+).
I was a grad student back when I posted that so a new or late-model car was out of the question. I have since purchased a lightly used car that had less than 6K miles on it.
I drove a '94 Camry from 1995-2011 and while it had thousands of dollars of repairs through the years, the thing was still running fine when I left Cleveland and had my parents sell it. 250,000 miles. Wow. Toyota made a wonderful car.
The average American car has been on rthe road for just under 11 years, which certqainly helps explain why the new car market is so hot right now.
However, the average length of a new car contract is 71 months, which makes no fiscal sense whatsoever, and even though the average transaction price on a new car is just over 32K, which means that a lot of folks can't intelligently afford such a car.
Translation; in spite of the bottomless amount of wealth on the Internet regarding buying a car, many Americans are still getting taken to the cleaners at their local dealership.
While driving through Canada, we saw many dealers offering 84 month financing and you can bet that trend is coming here. With the rather shocking price of new cars something has to give and cars are getting into mortgage territory.
The bride and I went the other way. We found ourselves needing a large SUV and new ones are the wrong side of $50K, some as high as $65K, and this is for Chevy/GMC, not even a premium brand. Not wanting to spend that kind of money, we bought a 2003 Suburban for $5K cash. It runs and drives just fine even with 205K miles on it. We plan to keep it as long as we need to. We can put several crate motors into the beast and still come up better that $65K, or the $48K on the original sticker that came with the truck.
Our others cars are a 11 year old MB and a 29 year old MB 380SL, and a 2005 Volvo V50 T5. The Ml320 was about a thrid of the cost new, the V50 about half and the roadster was a tenth. I do wish I'd figured the math out earlier but we have it figured out now!
The average American car has been on rthe road for just under 11 years, which certqainly helps explain why the new car market is so hot right now.
However, the average length of a new car contract is 71 months, which makes no fiscal sense whatsoever, and even though the average transaction price on a new car is just over 32K, which means that a lot of folks can't intelligently afford such a car.
Translation; in spite of the bottomless amount of wealth on the Internet regarding buying a car, many Americans are still getting taken to the cleaners at their local dealership.
Average length of loan is 71 months? Really? Got a link for that stat?
Experian said that 17% of all new car loans in the past quarter were between 73 and 84 months and there were even a few as long as 97 months. Four years ago, only 11% of loans fell into this category.
I can understand the long term loans. I was looking at financing a used car. $25,000 with $10,000 down. The monthly payment was well over $500. Not many people can add a $500 monthly expense into their budget. I am not looking into leasing a Volt while I save up a bigger downpayment. Or maybe I will just buy a cheaper used car that I do not like and drive it for a year or two and then trade up to something I like. (I just cannot see myself driving around in a Camry or an Accord.)
Financing for 8 years will bring the monthly payment down, but you probably end up paying 200% of the purchase price.
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