General rule about car payment

[MonkeyMama]

@OP - That is great!

To add to the cash discussion - we only pay cash for our cars. (When starting out - would finance for a year at most - have had plenty of time to save cash for every car since). Literally spending that kind of money on a car can leave you *Cash poor* or simply *cash poorer.* But, the point is say things are going well and you want to spend $30,000 on a car, and then you regret it later. Maybe you lose your job? Well, you can always sell the car. It's not quite as simple as you spent that cash and you can never get it back. Psychologically, I'd rather pay cash all the way. If I finance, it's somewhat out of my hands. I am still paying for the car and I then I lose a lot of flexibility. That is why I do not like to buy things I don't have the cash for. (If you have the cash and choose to finance it- I don't think that is quite the same - but I also don't see the point. But, I'd probably just downsize the car if I had future cash flow problems. As is, as a cash payer, I doubt I will ever pay that much for a car. I think it hurts more to pay cash and you think about it a wee bit harder, too. I know people are usually astounded that we pay cash because they imagine we paid 2-5 times as much for our cars. Every decade we can afford a much nicer car than the last one).

[ProjectX]

Hope everything works out for you. Good Luck.

[YLTL_Dan]

After shopping around for cars. We could not justify to take out a loan becasue our minivan has what we want along with all the safety features that newer cars have. We decided to let a man who runs his business out of his home garage to rebuild the transmission for $1,300. I will fix other little minor issues, such as brakes, computer module, etc for about $500. It feels good that we will not have a car payment for at least a year or two. Thnak you for all your feedback.

That's awesome! As my parents always told me... it stinks having big maintenance bills, but it's better than a car payment every month!!

[KiwiJo09]

Buyer's Remorse

After buying Hubby's car (and most of you will bear witness to this), I had buyer's remorse. It turned out to be the best possible decision we could have made. We keep up with the payments fine and the car runs great. His old car had nearly 200,000 miles on it and was costing us more in repairs than I care to admit. Even with the car payments, we're saving money with this car. Especially since newer cars are more gas efficient.

[disneysteve]

newer cars are more gas efficient.

This can not be stated as fact uniformly. Yes, there are newer cars that are more efficient. There are also newer cars that are less efficient. It all depends on the make and model. There were cars in 1980 that got better gas mileage than many of the "high efficiency" cars today. It all depends on what you are comparing.

[greenskeeper]

This can not be stated as fact uniformly. Yes, there are newer cars that are more efficient. There are also newer cars that are less efficient. It all depends on the make and model. There were cars in 1980 that got better gas mileage than many of the "high efficiency" cars today. It all depends on what you are comparing.

This is very true. The national "fleet average" actually dipped to it's lowest level since the 70s in the early 2000s due to the popularity of SUVs (stupid useless vehicles)

We are only now getting back on track with increasing fuel economy.

Diesel vw's in the 80s were getting 50mpgs with no problem at all.

My biggest complaint with the EPA is that they put priority on "clean-burning" more than fuel economy. There are cars in Europe that get 70mpg but we can't have them here because they aren't clean enough. Good thing all that pollution stays within the borders of Europe.