re: Article: "Record number of car buyers 'upside down' on trade-ins"

I get that a lot of people can't be trusted with debt, but seriously paying cash isn't always the best financial option.

Everyone always jumps on me about leasing but how is it so bad? My work car was 52k I wanna say, my lease is $3k down and $399/mo for 27 mo. So I pay $14k for 2 years of a new car and when it's over I go get another one without any maintenance headaches and without the hassle of trying to sell it and getting low ball offers from dealers and the retail public.

if you want to pay a premium to always have a new car without those little worries/headaches, leasing is smart. you're basically paying a tax for those luxuries, which is fine (as long as you understand that). we all pay "taxes" on the shite we enjoy/like

I'm saying I see lease deals all the time of $199/mo for entry level cars, I think I even saw $99 for something,maybe a Kia. Maintenance gets expensive when cars are out of warranty and then selling cars is such a pain. If you trade in then dealers kill you and if you private party sale it's a pin bc everyone low balls and wastes your time with test drives. Leases are nice bc they're headache free and you turn them in and move on assuming you don't drive 25k miles a year or more

I'm not saying it's bad,I'm just saying simple out of warranty things are so expensive. My previous work truck was a 10 year old Range Rover and it was prob worth $10-15k tops and the suspension went out and the repair itself was like $12k to do, so that was my last purchase of a car. I had a Tahoe before that Range Rover as my work truck and the evaporator core took like 2 days to do at my shop using my own guys, the labor required to do some menial things is mind blowing

My mechanic swears the European cars especially are so difficult to work on bc the unions in Europe need it to be that way to maintain jobs. If cars today were as simple to work on as the older cars of the 70s for example there would be way less need for the quantity of people in that field

What? I own my own shops at $79/hour labor which means I don't pay anything but parts but with that it still took my guys over 1 full day to do my evaporator core in the Tahoe. Have you seen that,do you know how time consuming it is to take apart the whole dashboard just to get to one tiny part? I don't know if one can lay $99/mo to lease a brand new car I'd do that all day, never waste time or money on repairs sounds like a helluva deal for $1200/year which is less than a major repair on a few year old used car

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Of course there are. This is what happens when you buy cars you can't afford with no money down and 9 years to pay for them with double digit interest rates.

Vehicles are worst investment a human can make.

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I see people all the time who trade in for a newer model inside of a year or two and it just boggles my mind. I understand the claim people make about wanting something reliable or changing circumstances (like expecting a child), but for the most part if you're trading in prior to your payoff, chances are your car is still too new for you to be experiencing issues.

First off, you're quite literally throwing money away by choice instead of by necessity (e.g. if your car was broken).

Secondly, it's incomprehensible how Americans still cannot grasp or understand the notion that vehicles are not an investment and that quite literally all of them depreciate rapidly, the obvious exception being things like rare or collector cars (if you can afford one of those, you're not upside down on anything).

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User cars have become a huge rip off.

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They really have.

I found a 2013 F-150 King Ranch this past year that I really liked and wanted, but it had nearly 70k miles on it and $36k was the rock bottom they'd do for me. That's rank insanity.

I ended up getting a brand new Tundra a few months later for ~$39k.

I like F-150s and I think about that truck every so often whenever I see one, but then I remind myself that I got a brand new truck with just 5 miles on it for nearly the same pricepoint.