Car Loans are a Bad Bet
The average car loan in America is now 70 months. That right 70!! What are we doing to ourselves? I cannot even look at the math involved in this. Here is my experience with car loans. I purchased a vehicle in 2004 and took out a loan for 75% of the value (25% down). It took me 19 months to pay that vehicle off. I NEVER want to go back to making car payments. It sucks the life out of your budget. $389 per month is the average car payment in the US. Not having that hanging over you is like getting a $6000 per year raise (before taxes). You see our problem isn’t that we do not have enough money. It is that we spend our money in very poor ways. Cars go down in value 99.9% of the time. So when you are done paying off that vehicle it is worth as little as one fifth of what you paid for it (if you bought a Dodge even less). So instead of going out and buying that shiny new vehicle why not deal with the clunker a little longer and save up your money for a nice used vehicle (that vehicle I puchased above only had 28,000 miles on it). This way you do not take the big cut in value and get a great vehicle. There is only one way to keep the house from winning in the game of car loans, and that is to not play.
