People in power will squeeze and squeeze. They’ll crank up the interest rates. They want you to default on the equity. Take your payments and your car. That’s how they make their money.
The shift towards massive vehicles (SUVs) and trucks loaded to the tits with tech junk is to blame. Auto industry sold the idea to Americans that their fat ass needs a compensator instead of psychiatric help.
Nah.
It’s poor planing and over spending that is the issue. People who lease cars are on an endless cycle of never owning anything and always laying a premium.
Just actually buy a car you can actually afford.monthly payments on and drive the car into the ground. Every car in have owned has made it at least a decade and a 150k miles. Once you are done paying off take what the monthly payment would be and out it into two banks account split 20/80. Woth the 80% being towards a new car and the 20% being for repairs.
Ten years and only 150k? Must be nice to work from home. A home located in the south where they don’t salt the roads.
Must also be nice to be able to afford to live somewhere where your tools don’t get stolen every time you leave the house. Because of course you are going to need tools to maintain your car to 10yrs and 150k… unless you are one of those really rich people who can afford to have someone else fix your car.
This doesn’t work for me specifically, so it’s absurd and stupid that anyone else does it.
Wherever you live sounds like a shithole.
At my last place where we live for over a decade we had nice patio furniture and garden tools out on the front lawn and the only time something was touched is when a neighbor borrowed it for a day. Never had so much as a little kids toy taken.
You should hop in your car and move someplace where people don’t steal your shit. It’s easier than you think to set up in a new area ( I’ve done it multiple times in my life with less than $100 in my pocket. ) people only think they are stuck and it become a self fulfilling prophecy.
I live in NJ and my last car before this had a 100mile round trip commute on it. Last I checked they salt the roads. I don’t do any maintenance on my car. I take it in for service at the dealer during the finance period and then a local shop near me for larger repairs. I take it to a valvoline for oil changes. Last car I retired needed a total of 6grand in repairs over its life that weren’t regular maintaine. That is why I said to take 20% of the payment and put it in a bank account for repairs. You should read another person’s posts before making a bunch of self serving assumptions to make your self feel better
https://www.trustedchoice.com/insurance-articles/wheels-wings-motors/average-miles-driven-per-year/
Looks about dead average to me.
Exactly. I like cars so it starts to suck keeping them for 10 years but otherwise I’d be in continual car payments.
Also taxes and insurance get cheaper as the car gets older too, so that helps.
Yup. We run two cars since we both commute for work but one is fully paid off and the other one is almost done. They payment for the first one is now going into a repair account for it and a down payment account.
The reason we haven’t paid off the other car is because we had 0% financing. So the money going into the ally account is making us money vs the bank having it.
We also have a gm card and both cars are gm. So we should have several thousands to redeem on that towards a new down payment.
My wife’s Honda has over 300k and still runs fine and doesn’t use oil. We put $10k aside for an emergency down payment, but every month it keeps going we are a few hundred dollars wealthier.
I laugh at my buddies who constantly need to have new vehicle.
Too many see their car as a measure of their worth.
Funny thing is my wife bought herself a beat up 1980 squarebody pickup for hauling stuff around the farm and you cannot take it out anywhere without people stopping to comment it and she only paid 4k for it… Hell, we have near weekly offers from strangers to buy it off of us at a premium. I want to emphasise it is not some pavement princess it has whiskey wrinkles from past owners and plenty of rusty bits.
My brother in law and sister in law. They have two brand new leases and a house they can’t afford and have been borrowing money from my in laws to keep afloat.
Lots of people over spend this way. I had a friend who was making $700 a month payments on a used Mercedes suv as a new teacher.
Lots of people over spend on dumb shit.
People should stop buying 40k vehicles and get the shitty econbox then 🤷♂️
Yes, it sucks you can’t get a free loan and stretch your $700 to 6 years.
Shit, entry-level cars still run you $20k or better in the US, and that’s without any options. I just had to price a new car last year and literally nothing new was on the market in my area for less than $25k. Your old Toyota Tercel that you bought for $6k in the 80s doesn’t exist anymore. That brand-new Camry that’ll run for 30 years and only costs $12k is now double that, at least.
$6000 in 1980 is equivalent to over $23k in 2023.
https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=6%2C000.00&year1=198001&year2=202309
I got a 2023 Hyundai Elantra Limited with all the options for $27,000 earlier this year and that was brand new. The standard/base Elantra was several thousand less. There was another model below the Elantra for even less. I also didn’t haggle and took the price as marked, so who knows. Perhaps someone more charismatic than myself could have done better on it.
I still over paid, don’t get me wrong. The same car with all the features before Covid would have probably been around $22-23k.
This is just an anecdote, not a defense or counter argument by any means. Somebody around me has figured out how to import what I think is a Suburu Sambar. It’s a micro suv/truck, and I’ve seen more than three around my area suddenly. I’ve also seen a couple of right hand drive skylines all of a sudden, so I don’t know if something has changed, but maybe importing is an option
Dealers are starting to call around. They’re acting confident but they know the market has collapsed… they’re all trying to sell the last NFT.
My dad found a rural lot near here where a bunch of dealers are parking inventory so they can still make it look like a shortage. One dealer still has $5k markups last I checked, but also still have the car I looked at ~5 months ago.
Toyota is selling a basic (no ABS brakes, no airbags, crank windows) pickup in the rest of the world for $10,000. They could probably sell a version with the optional safety equipment in the US for $15-20k. But they will not sell it here and mess up the $50-100k luxury pickup gravy train.
At least they aren’t doing what the big 3 do with their trucks. A mid range XLT F-150 will cost about the same as a fully decked out Tundra, and a fully decked out F-150 will set you back over $100K, but these were sold for $50-$75K just before the pandemic, so what changed? They just decided to charge more due to greed.
I look at it as fleecing the assholes who buy those fucking things for vanity. Keep it up Ford and GM. Make them go fucking broke.
Me too. Otherwise, I am clinging to my '99 Silverado with 8 foot bed, single bench seat, and crank windows. (And no, it’s not my daily driver. I only use it when I need to move a Big Dumb Object, which is often enough in my line of work that it’s worth it.) I’m holding out hope that someone will finally make a usable electric work truck, but that chance was never that great and seems to be getting slimmer with each passing minute.
And before the fuckcars crowd jumps down my throat, my insurance charges me precisely $165 per year on this piece of shit, and it costs me $40 a year to keep it plated. That’s less than the cost of renting a U-Haul twice after you add on all their bullshit gotchas and fees.
My truck is a tool. It is not a vanity item or a luxury. Not only do I not need it to have leather seats, power everything, and a moonroof – I don’t want it to, because I will just break all of that stuff and it does not do anything to actually make the vehicle useful as a truck.
