Mishri

That isn't true, whether you owe on it or not it depcriates, it doesn't change how much you paid for it or any other factor. it's very simple, either you have 35,000 to invest and earn a modest 4% interest on, and pay 1.9% to finance that 35,000 car, or you have 0 to invest but have a car that is paid off, both are depcriating at the same rate. but you gain 2.1% over paying cash for it.

The real advice for finance is don't buy a depreciating asset, take the bus or train or whatever you have there, or buy one that has already depreciated, cars made before 1985 have depreciated about as much as they are going to. You can alternatively reduce your depreciation loss by buying used, although frequently 1-2 year old cars haven't depreciated enough, you need to look at atleast 5 year old cars.


After reading all of the responses in here it appears investment is not taught in school anymore, figure out your net gain vs paying for things. You used to be able to take a loan to make stock investments, made sense when you paid 3% on the loan and made 10% on the stock market, everyone was doing it, but companies were way over valued and lead to a stock market crash and all of those loans going bad.

pretty much all of the very wealthy people that had mortgages through a bank I worked for were always late on their payments, because they had low interest loans and were using their money to invest in, they had $2-$20 mil financed homes and are paying more in interest per year than your car costs, but it was worth it for their investments.

Being debt free is alright, since nothing is certain and you might not be making the money to make your payments, but if you have the money there is no reason to pay off early on a low interst loan, it just doesn't make sense, I haven't seen any reason given by anyone in this thread to pay it off early or pay cash, just people saying thats what you should do, but why? I have and a couple of others have given valid points on why you should finance., if the interest rate is low.

I also agree, if you have 0% interest never pay off early, put that money into investments, or you should have gotten the rebates instead and then paid less for your car.

I saw the post about being done with payments, but are the payments really that tight if you can pay extra on it? And at your rate it looks like more than double the payments? If you just dont like making payments, auto-draft, i use it on most of my payments.

chain1

What a retarded thread. It's all mathematical. Just use a loan calculator or something. I could tell you that I'm paying $200/month for my car. Does that mean I got a good deal? Nope. I STILL might have paid 50k for a 2011 GT/CS.

duggyb

The thread was not started to see who was getting the BEST deal, the thread was started to see exactly what i have seen, how many people pay cash for there stangs, how many people are in the 300-400 range with a payment, 500-600 range, etc

i just wanted to gauge a general idea of how many people actually owe on their cars, etc.

also i ended up not getting the 11 CS, i picked up a 09 GT and am paying $435 a month over 60

Thanks!
Dustin

SNV425

I'm not going to lie, I'm paying a little over $650

bakerjd

$370/month...will be paid off in exactly one year (as long as I can stick to the plan)

Thor

$306 a month.

KXRM

There are two ways to look at this, yes, it is "better" to keep cash that you are earning interest on rather then purchase a depreciating asset. However, there are risk factors to consider with financing a vehicle and that is debt. As a rule of thumb I don't like to carry more debt then I can pay off in a given period of time. This is a personal rule and it comes from avoiding being over exposed to debt.

Most people do not know how to properly invest and earn more then what they can get from a CD or Savings Account. This typically falls in line with what they lose on an installment loan for a new vehicle. If you are earning anything more then you are exposed to risk factors on that side. So yea, if I can be 100% certain that I can earn my more money back by keeping cash I won't pay cash. The fact is you can't. Not in today's financial market.

All that aside the truly best way to pay is with what you have earned. Which is what I did. Take a sum of money, earn something with it, then take those earnings and reward yourself. This way you are mitigating the risk both ways. Sure you have to wait longer to get your purchase, but in the end you avoided paying interest on anything and you are using pure profit to buy something.

05xrunner

1.9% $307 month on my 2010

grnbayfan

like me, either you have bad credit or no money down.

Mishri

You must not have looked at enough investments. Maybe look into Annuities, one of my favorites gives a guaranteed 2.5% return and follows the S&P 500, you earn the avg the stock market went up for the year -2%, so if it goes up 10%, you get 8%, if it goes down -5% you gain 2.5%. better than paying off that 1.9% interest loan. You do have to keep it in there atleast 7 years though, you can pull it out but you have to pay a 10% penalty. Your personal rules are limiting your financial success. Keep enough in accessable money to pay your bills for 6 months if you want to have any kind of personal rule about being conservitive with money.